de Young Revisits 80s Fashion With ‘Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love’

Kelly’s life experiences flowed directly into his fashion. The multicolored buttons that appear throughout his early work pay homage to his grandmother Ethel Rainey, who would sew different colored buttons onto his childhood clothes when the originals fell off. In Kelly’s hands, the buttons become about creating art in any situation, and about letting one’s own life flow into that art.

Kelly’s work was never a mistake, everything he did was intentional and open to interpretation. “He never explained; he did,” Aleman says.

Themes from his Southern upbringing appear in less comforting ways. Symbols of the racism he experienced while living through segregation found their way into this work; he began collecting racist memorabilia after he moved to Paris in 1979. In the “Mississippi in Paris” section of the exhibit, an outfit from Kelly’s Spring/Summer 1986 collection features a white lace shirt and matching skirt, accessorized with a necklace and earrings made of roses and Black baby dolls. Amelan remembers how he once gave Kelly an ashtray for his birthday, decorated with what Amelan didn’t realize was a racist image. Instead of taking offense, Kelly incorporated the image into his work. He replied to criticism with, “If we can’t deal with where we’ve been, it’s gon’ to be hard to go somewhere.”

Kelly was also heavily influenced by the artists and designers who came before him. The matching wool sets from his Fall/Winter 1988 collection resemble the iconic tweed sets of Chanel. On the wall opposite his designs, photos show Kelly adopting Coco Chanel-like poses. Dancer Josephine Baker, another Black American who sought out creative freedom in Paris, was also one of Kelly’s inspirations. Baker’s famous banana skirt appeared in Kelly’s Fall/Winter 1986 collection, accompanied by a pink spiral wire bra top and matching pink shoes, an update to the outfit Baker wore in her “Banana Dance” performance. In a video from the fashion show the model in this design dances down the runway.

Kelly’s last show, 1989’s “Lisa Loves the Louvre,” was based on the idea of the Mona Lisa inviting the designer to her “house” (the Louvre). Models wore T-shirt dresses with red stockings. Kelly placed himself in a frame, posing like the Mona Lisa. At the de Young, the centerpiece of this section of the exhibition is a placeholder for Kelly himself: his infamous overalls, worn with a heart-covered shirt and a flipped-brim cap that reads “Paris.”

For a show about fashion design, Runway of Love is full of such snippets of text. The words “Nothing is impossible” appear on a window overlooking the exhibition, the same words etched into Kelly’s tombstone at the ​​Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. For a brief moment in Kelly’s too-short life, these words rang true. Now, his clothes speak for themselves, conveying his spirit of love and joy through the language of fashion.

‘Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love’ is on view at San Francisco’s de Young Museum through April 24, 2022. Details here.