An Original American In Paris

By Margot Hornblower

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, as if to say "Shhh!" and tiptoed out. Only then did thumping rock music explode, spotlights ignite and towering models burst onto the runway in kaleidoscopic color.

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 on four continents. "Patrick is refreshing because he isn't trying to be divine," says Mary Ann Wheaton, who runs Kelly's worldwide operations.

As 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 black would seem more like an insult.

For Kelly, born and raised in Vicksburg, Miss., being an American black in Paris -- and reveling in it -- is a cachet that opens doors. His logo is a grinning golliwog. On promotion tours he startles fans by handing out 3-in. plastic black doll pins as mementos. His first Louvre show, a spoof on the Mona Lisa, included such numbers as "Jungle Lisa loves Tarzan" (decollete leopard-print gowns) and "Moona Lisa" (Plexiglas-bubble headgear and silver- star-studded dresses). At his second Louvre show, two weeks ago, the crowd shrieked and whistled its approval for such outfits as "Cowboys" (fringed jackets and pony-skin patterns) and "Blackamoors" (gold and silver turbans over satin cocktail suits). The invitation to the show featured a photo of Kelly naked but for a gilt loincloth. "He's very exotic to the French," says Nina Dausset, a former Elle editor. "He has his own folklore."

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, his business has shot up from $795,000 a year to $7 million a year. "Behind all of Kelly's Folies-Bergere, there are real clothes with high-voltage whimsy," says Bernard Ozer of Associated Merchandising Corp. "He's selling well in an uphill market."

In Kelly's Rue du Parc-Royal headquarters, Aunt Jemima rag dolls flop on a Louis Vuitton footlocker. Josephine Baker posters loom over a rainbow coalition of assistants. When Kelly's cousin Michael Thomas, a 345-lb. trucker, came to see the Louvre debut, he brought 20 packages of grits. ("Patrick said, 'If you don't bring no grits, don't come," said Thomas, grinning.) The models really chowed down. "I'm not the Great Black Hope, honey," says Kelly. "But it's like the old song, 'You use what you got to get what you want.' "

Kelly's friends know him for his French-fries frenzies and chili-dog cravings. But beware of stereotypes. A Redskins cap planted on his head, the designer can also be found at his favorite restaurant, L'Ambroisie, over a $150 lunch of scallops and Sauterne, waxing eloquent on the merits of white vs. black truffles. Anyone who refers to Kelly's origins as "poor black" is quickly set straight with a portrait of working-class warmth. "They expect that you come off some family that picked cotton with holes in their shoes," he says. "My grandmother worked for rich white people. Our hand-me-downs were good hand-me-downs!" Though Kelly's grandmother was a cook, his mother was a home economics teacher with a master's degree, his father, a fishmonger, insurance agent and cabdriver.

Interviews lurch into free association: how the shopping malls in Thailand look just like the ones in Mississippi; why he hung real crystals on his black knit dresses ("The spiritual thing was cute, but mainly I liked the way they looked"); how maybe he lends clothes to certain actresses, "but Goldie Hawn paid cold cash"; reflections on culture ("I like museums -- but really fast. I can do a museum in half an hour"). Autobiography can be selective. He won't reveal his age (mid-30s by deduction). "It puts you in a category," he insists. "You're not fresh enough to be new." Ask him about his father leaving home, and he sidesteps the question with an ode to his dad's shoes (black-and-white pony skin). Kelly wants to remember Mississippi merry, not Mississippi burning. But one memory sticks: when secondhand books were shipped over from the white elementary school across town, he said, "they'd color in the faces of Dick and Sally so they'd be black when they got to us."

Kelly plasters gardenias on his gowns, makes hats in the form of watermelon slices and flaunts pink flounces: inspiration that comes, he says, from the full-figured ladies parading to Vicksburg's Baptist church on Sundays. Ever since an aunt taught him to sew, Kelly has known what he wanted to be. Nonetheless, at Jackson State University, then an all-black school, he went through a "militant stage." His best friend hanged himself in jail. "I remember singing 'Burn, baby, burn,' and knowing what it meant," Kelly says. And there was the teacher, Michael Thomas recalled, who "told Pat he'd never amount to anything. Right after that, Pat dropped out."

Fresh off a Greyhound bus in Atlanta, Kelly lodged six months with a "crazy pimp" he'd met on the street. "Whores, drag queens would give me their money to hold for them," he said. "People liked me." In Atlanta he decorated Yves Saint Laurent windows for free. ("He was my hero. I tried to do them just the way Mr. Saint Laurent would have wanted them.") A job sorting clothes for Amvets gave Kelly access to discarded Chanel suits and old beaded gowns. Soon he had his own antique-clothing boutique. When ends didn't meet, "I'd rob stained glass out of homes that were being demolished and sell it." Later, at New York City's prestigious Parsons School of Design, Kelly would "sell other people their homework" to make tuition payments. He hung out with the glitterati at Studio 54. "I wanted to be somebody so bad," he sighs. But broke again, he dropped out. No designer would hire him.

Kelly's story has a mythic quality: fairy godparents pop up at the right time, dark perils lead to happy endings. An old friend from Atlanta, model Pat Cleveland, ran into him on the street. She suggested Paris and, unasked, sent him a one-way ticket. The Warnaco deal had the same Kellyesque serendipity. Three years ago, Kelly was free-lancing while building his own label. "If we'd have sneezed, we'd have gone bankrupt," he remembers. Enter journalist Gloria Steinem on assignment to do a profile about Kelly for NBC's Today show. Steinem introduced Kelly to Warnaco CEO Linda Wachner.

When he first got to Paris, Kelly holed up in a small hotel, sharing a tiny room with a 6-ft. 2-in. model named Kim ("Her feet stuck out from the end of the bed"). He sewed like a madman, buying only enough fabric to make the next dress. From selling clothes at a flea market, he progressed to making costumes for a discotheque and, with the help of his business partner, Bjorn Amelan, outfits for a trendy Right Bank boutique and for Benetton. By 1985, his own little black dresses, decorated with bows and buttons, were selling out at Bergdorf Goodman's. Now, with Warnaco behind him, Kelly is expanding rapidly, with 60% of his sales in the U.S. and a booming demand in Europe and the Far East.

Months before a show, Kelly is in high gear. Red sweat pants peeping from under the overalls, he sits high at his drafting 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 a fold there on a muslin pattern. Later, salesmen unload briefcases of fabrics. Kelly picks up a purple knit. He smells it. "Combien?" he inquires. The answer: 125 francs ($20) per meter. "Why so much?" Kelly challenges. The bargaining is serious: Kelly, whose dresses run from $395 to $2,200, builds his business on providing a less expensive alternative to other Paris-based designers.

From the first sketch to the moment he spray-paints his red heart on the runway, Kelly wrestles with the tiniest details. Two hours before the last show, he was backstage in the Louvre tent amid models, dressers, seamstresses, hairdressers, makeup artists, lighting technicians and stagehands. "Paint those red lips!" he ordered. "I want you to look like you just got rid of your third husband!" Dashing through mounds of hats decorated with rhinestone Eiffel Towers, past racks of pink minks, turquoise ostrich feathers, Mexican blankets and red sequined gowns, he fusses with a model's hair. He directs a seamstress to stitch a new lining in a fur cape. Three minutes before showtime, Kelly joins hands with everyone for a revival-style prayer: "Thank God for making us be together," he says. "You make me so happy." The group bursts into cheers of "Yay! Yay!" and the music flicks on to the opening song, Real Love.

While Kelly builds a celebrity clientele with the likes of Bette Davis, Paloma Picasso and Jane Seymour, he works hard to keep a high profile: off to a fashion-power AIDS banquet one night, to the opening of Regine's new nightclub another. The publicity game is paying off. Licensing negotiations for Kelly furs, sunglasses and jewelry are under way. The designer is looking for rental space to house a museum for his collection of 6,000 black dolls. Paris Match featured a six-page spread of Grace Jones posing in Kelly's clothes. Michael Douglas stopped by to chat about making a movie based on his career. At the Louvre, television cameras from West Germany, Canada, Japan and the U.S. trailed the designer. "What's the message?" inquired a correspondent. "It's a heavy glamour trip," Kelly explained. Then past the clothes bite and on to the personality bite. "Are you growing up?" she demanded abruptly. "No," said Kelly. "I'm having fun."