![]() On view from October 23 to April 2022, the traveling show features original designs, personal artifacts, and other ephemera from Kelly’s life, in addition to seventy-nine fully accessorized ensembles. Now, visitors of the De Young Museum in San Francisco will have an opportunity to explore that universe, through the new exhibition Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love. I wanted to be a part of Patrick Kelly’s universe. Most importantly, the majority of his models were Black, and as a height-challenged teen with dreams of becoming a model, seeing Black women command the runway and magazines in his designs created a seismic shift in me. I was initially struck by his runway shows, which actually looked fun-the models sashayed, skipped, and twirled in his clothing, turning the catwalk into a party. This is where I first saw the American fashion designer Patrick Kelly. In hopes of emulating my own chic mother’s fashion sense, I’d study the designers and models featured on CNN’s weekly show. The exhibition aims to help preserve it, while at the same time addressing the injustices of the fashion history canon “and correcting that canon and trying to make it more equitable,” Camerlengo says.As a child, my Saturday morning rituals consisted of cartoons, hot combs, laundry, and Soul Train somewhere amid the chaos of chores and the requisite entertainment required to sustain the work, I would catch glimpses of Style with Elsa Klensch. The Kelly Initiative, founded in 2020 by 250 Black fashion professionals eager to break down racial barriers, is a reminder of just how vital the designer’s legacy is. Kelly’s short but pivotal career has found new gravitas in an industry calling for inclusivity. There are the kitschy and controversial items he sought out, but there is also his “Josephine Baker ephemera and African textiles and masks,” Camerlengo says, “and you see how he was starting to understand his own identity, and how that translated into the workspace, and how that manifested in the fashion designs,” she says. Photo: Gary Sexton / Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San FranciscoĬamerlengo notes that the exhibition’s advising scholar, Sequoia Barnes, describes Kelly as a steward of Blackness. Camerlengo, associate curator of costume and textile arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Left to right: Exhibition designer Tristan Telander and presenting curator Laura L. Telander’s reimagining of the atelier is included in the exhibition’s expansive “Mississippi in Paris” section, which references Kelly’s upbringing in the American South and his own experience as a Black man, heightened by the display of racist memorabilia Kelly personally amassed over the years. “They were almost like a prop,” Telander points out, noting how although she was able to source Chiavari chairs in Kelly’s preferred hue of gold, the dark-red tufted seat covers were courtesy of Adalberto Castrillon from the museum’s technical team, who carefully re-created them from a photo. He used them at his shows and photo shoots, and he scattered them all over the atelier. “The challenge was to weave them in so that they are not front and center, but are still decorative and don’t look too campy,” she says.Ĭhiavari chairs were another of Kelly’s passions. ![]() To honor the abundance of flora that also warmed Kelly’s atelier, Telander’s assemblage of greenery draws from such details like the monstera leaves that his models sometimes held on the runway. When he had his shows and fittings and parties they would always be there,” she says. “He had them in every nook and cranny in a backdropped way. The myriad of objects that crowded Kelly’s workspace-including fans, figurines, and postcards-immediately struck Telander. ![]()
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