He Loved the '80s

The Brooklyn Museum's Patrick Kelly Retrospective Looks Back To the Decade of Danceteria, Grace Jones, and Big Hair

By CHRIS SCHMIDT

If you're one of those who rankles at the thought of fashion appearing at a museum, a new show of the work of fashion designer Patrick Kelly at the Brooklyn Museum of Art will likely do little to change your mind.

Kelly's clothes -- which epitomize the bold,graphic, big-shouldered 1980s -- charm, but don't impress. With only a semester of formal study at Parsons School of Design, Kelly, who died of AIDS in 1990, was not a brilliant craftsman or a fashion innovator. Instead, Kelly's achievement was to capture the 1980s go-go zeitgeist in a commerical yet playful way.What makes this small feat remarkable is its improbability. Kelly was the most unlikely of media darlings: a Mississippi-born, black designer who somehow managed to take the Paris fashion world by storm: He was the first American member to be invited into the Chambre Syndicale, the prestigious governing body of French fashion.

But on a more popular level, it was as "The King of Cling" that Kelly came to be known -- for his obsessive use of stretch jersey and lycra. (Bellwether of the era: One of Kelly's dresses was featured in a Virginia Slims ad.) Though tight, Kelly's designs were sweet, not sleazy. His design signature was to use buttons -- oversized, multi-hued, and cheap -- as though they were sequins. It was a practice picked up from his Mississippi grandmother, who would playfully mix and match buttons to disguise the fact that when one fell off a shirt she couldn't find an exact match.

The installation of the Brooklyn Museum show, guestcurated by The Studio Museum of Harlem's Thelma Golden, resembles Keith Haring's Pop Shop, or Danceteria, more than it does a museum show.Video monitors hanging from the ceiling play clips of Kelly's runway shows. Outsized magazine photographs of Kelly's clothing cover the walls.And a repeating track of house music bounces off the room's walls (Kelly was a fan of the legendary dance club Paradise Garage). All of these touches distract from the clothes. But this may not be a bad thing. Fashion is often more about image, in the broader sense of the word, than about seams and stitches.And you get the feeling that Kelly's customers -- Grace Jones, Madonna, and Bette Midler among them -- would have felt right at home in this gallery-cum-playspace.

The most interesting design in the show -- not so much in aesthetic terms, but for what it tells us about the Kelly mythology -- is a magenta bikini top paired with a banana skirt. The outfit is of course an allusion to Josephine Baker, who, in the 1920s, wowed the crowds at the Folies Bergere by wearing little more than a string of bananas around her hips.The homage is instructive. Like Baker, Kelly struggled in America, but was embraced by the French, who called Kelly,"le mignon petit noir Americain" (the cute little black American). And like Baker, Kelly was not afraid of emphasizing, even exploiting, his racial difference.

For Vanity Fair, Annie Leibovitz photographed Kelly in his signature overalls (shades of Jean-Michel Basquiat), amid a phalanx of models wearing his designs. As in Kelly's runway presentations, most of the models were black. The twist was that in the photograph, the few white models wore blackface.

That's not the only time Kelly mined the history of racist iconography in his designs. His design logo was a stylized golliwog -- the exaggerated racist caricature of black men -- that the designer printed on jersey dresses and even made into buttons. One dress in the show is printed with watermelons; another was inspired by Aunt Jemima.

The use of such icons was -- and continues to be -- controversial. Kelly was reprimanded by the NAACP for his appropriation of racist imagery; the French, meanwhile, loved it. Also included in the Brooklyn Museum show is Kelly's collection of turn-of-the-century racist memorabilia. Even the act of collecting such objects, as Spike Lee's film "Bamboozled" made clear, is a touchy issue in the African-American community. Yet Ms. Golden makes the claim that Kelly's use of such imagery was more sophisticated, and may have inspired later African-American artists like Kara Walker, whose appropriation of racist stereotypes is celebrated because, appearing on the gallery wall rather than in the department store, its critique is more obvious.

My favorite piece in the exhibit, though, is a much simpler pleasure: a prose poem from Bette Davis extolling the wonders of Kelly's clothing. It's a letter as precious for its breathless tone as for its misspellings ("shrik" for "shriek"). Davis was greatly charmed by Kelly and wore one of his creations on a David Letterman appearance in 1987. Not only did she plug Kelly on the show, but she gave one of his golliwog buttons to Mr. Letterman and announced that Kelly needed a financial backer. The very next day, Linda Wachner from Warnaco signed Kelly to her fashion conglomerate, granting him a previously elusive financial security.

It was the very unlikeliness of Kelly's success that makes his short-lived triumph so sweet. His designs were sought after by the swells of haute couture, but he never forgot his roots. One of the last things you'll see in the exhibit is Kelly's "Love List," printed in large type on the wall. One of his favorite things, he writes, is Paris in the springtime, to which he adds, "But especially in Mississippi!"