Patrick Kelly

Patrick Kelly was born on the twenty-fourth of September 1954 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the son of Letha Mae Kelly, a home economics teacher, and Danie S. Kelly, a cab driver. Raised in the segregated Black community of Vicksburg, he drew his earliest sense of style and craft from the women of his family — above all his grandmother, Ethel Rainey, whose habit of mending clothes with mismatched buttons would one day become his signature.

He studied art and African American history at Jackson State University before moving to Atlanta in 1974, where he dressed shop windows and sold vintage finds. In 1979 he enrolled briefly at Parsons School of Design in New York, then crossed the Atlantic to Paris, designing costumes at the nightclub Le Palace and selling his own dresses on the street and through the Victoire boutiques.

Recognition came swiftly: a six-page spread in French Elle in 1985, and backing from the Warnaco conglomerate in 1987. In 1988 he was admitted to the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode — the first American, and the first Black designer of any nationality, so honored. His work overflowed with exuberance, humor, and the pointed reclamation of Black folk imagery, joy worn defiantly.

Patrick Kelly died in Paris on the first of January 1990, at thirty-five, of complications from AIDS. He rests in Père-Lachaise beneath the words "Nothing Is Impossible." He turned the buttons of a grandmother's mending into a language of pride, and taught fashion to remember where beauty comes from.