Patrick Kelly

Patrick Kelly was born on the twenty-fourth of September 1954 at Vicksburg, Mississippi, the son of Letha Kelly — a Vicksburg home economics teacher — and Abraham Tate. He was raised in the segregated Black community of Vicksburg, where his grandmother Ethel Rainey worked as a domestic for the Vicksburg white aristocratic households of the post-civil-rights period.

He attended Jackson State University at Jackson, Mississippi from 1973 to 1976 and studied art history and African American history.

He relocated to Atlanta in 1977 and operated as a visual merchandiser for the principal Atlanta vintage clothing boutique AnaisAtlanta — and at the principal Yves Saint Laurent rive gauche boutique at Atlanta from 1979 to 1980.

He relocated to New York in 1979 and studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design at New York. He produced across the principal early-1980s New York period the principal commissioned work for the model Pat Cleveland and the principal Greenwich Village Black creative community.

He relocated to Paris in February 1980 on a one-way ticket reportedly purchased by Pat Cleveland — and worked across the early 1980s as a freelance designer for the principal Parisian fashion houses including Paco Rabanne.

He launched the principal Patrick Kelly Paris commercial collection of 1985 at the Café de Flore at Saint-Germain-des-Prés — at a fashion show staged on the café terrace.

He was signed in 1987 by the principal American fashion-industry corporation Warnaco — at a multi-year commercial license agreement worth approximately five million dollars — at the principal post-1985 commercial expansion of the Patrick Kelly Paris collection.

He was elected on the seventh of April 1988 to the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode at Paris — the principal Parisian commercial fashion governing body — the first American designer and the first Black designer of any nationality to be admitted to the Chambre Syndicale.

He was the principal couturier of the late-1980s Parisian fashion period to incorporate the principal African American iconography — including the principal heart-shaped buttons, the principal golliwog dolls, the principal watermelon motifs, and the principal Black-dolls fashion show finales — in a deliberate Black-American reclamation of the principal post-slavery iconography of the American South.

He died at Paris on the first of January 1990 of complications of AIDS, at thirty-five.

He is honored here as the first American admitted to the Chambre Syndicale.