Word: fashionability
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Afternoon shadows slid through the archways of the Louvre Palace into the splendor of a 16th century courtyard. Across the cobblestones, as if for a medieval tournament, white tents opened their flaps to costumed crowds. Celebrities, fashion journalists and retailers from Kansas City to Kuwait milled about. Suddenly, without fanfare, a man in cut-off overalls, a ponytail and phosphorescent orange hightops strolled onto an enclosed runway and slowly spray-painted a huge red heart on a white backdrop. With the exaggerated staginess of a Looney Tune, he turned to the audience, pressed a finger to his lips...
Thus did Patrick Kelly, the guy in the size 56 denims, rocket into the stratosphere of high fashion last fall as the first American ever admitted into the clubby, self-important Chambre Syndicale, the pantheon of 43 Paris- based designers who may show at the Louvre. The French buzzed and clucked at the outrageousness of the new upstart. After all, who but Kelly could boast that only eight years ago he was peddling his clothes on the sidewalk of the Boulevard St.-Germain, calling out to passersby in a Mississippi drawl, "Tres chic! Pas cher!"? Now he's selling...
...much as any designer today, Kelly blurs the line between fashion and show biz. "I think of myself as a black male Lucille Ball," he says. "I like making people laugh." Indeed, can one imagine the reclusive Yves Saint Laurent skateboarding a la Kelly through Paris' seedier neighborhoods? Picture crusty Karl Lagerfeld nude from the waist up, posing for Vanity Fair, with red buttons over his nipples and 16 satin bows on his pigtails? Such antics have charmed the powerful French fashion press. "Le mignon petit noir Americain," enthused one Paris newspaper -- although in America being called a cute little...
Even Horatio Alger would find it improbable that the first American to break into the charmed circle of the world's fashion capital -- where others have tried and failed -- would be a two-time college dropout who once slept in Atlanta restaurants when he had no home, collected rejection slips on Manhattan's Seventh Avenue and was evicted from his Harlem apartment for not paying rent. "What Patrick has done, no one else has done," says Audrey Smaltz, a New York City fashion-show producer. Since July 1987, when Kelly signed a licensing contract with the $600 million conglomerate Warnaco...
...table, drawing in deft strokes, crumpling up sketches one after another and sipping hot tea from a tall glass. Interruptions are constant. "No!" he barks, surveying a list of proposed models. "We need someone with de vraies fesses -- a real fanny." The sultry beauties who glower through most French fashion shows must learn to prance, dance, skip and even smile for Kelly's semiannual follies. He dismisses another candidate offhandedly: "Tell her she can do my show if she stops doing drugs." Meanwhile, the designer darts in and out of the sewing room, nipping a tuck here and pinning...