A Designer With Heart - Wall Street Journal

April 30, 2014 4:40 p.m. ET

Philadelphia

The fashion designer Patrick Kelly didn't just wear his heart on his sleeve: he drew, wove, stitched, buttoned and embroidered it anywhere it would fit. He put Valentine hearts on bodices and bottoms, covered little black dresses in heart-shaped buttons, and graffitied hearts on the invitations to his fashion shows. The heart was his signature, shorthand for "love"—love of women, love of fashion, love of fashion history and the haute couture, and love, as well, of his humble roots in the American South. Kelly's career was short—less than five years from his first official collection in 1985 until his death on Jan. 1, 1990—but his Paris-or-bust momentum makes for a body of work both winning and touching. "Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love," which opened Sunday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is a bubble of ebullience that floats us back to the air-kiss '80s, a time when hard-won and hard-partying freedoms suddenly smacked up against mortality.

The first line of the show's introductory wall text states that it was "An anonymous gift of a one-way ticket" that brought Kelly to Paris in 1979, when he was 25. His swift and improbable trajectory—less an embodiment of the American dream than the impossible dream—found support at every turn: from the woman who bought him that one-way ticket—model Pat Cleveland—to the editors at Elle magazine who gave his work a six-page spread in 1985; from Yves Saint Laurent co-founder Pierre Bergé, who sponsored Kelly's 1988 induction into France's Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter, to models Iman, Beverly Johnson, Naomi Campbell and L'Wren Scott, all of whom walked Kelly's runway for free, out of (what else?) love. The generosity of these colleagues speaks to Kelly's own generous talent and charm. Certainly he was something different, this self-taught (despite two years of college and some study at Parsons) young hopeful from Vicksburg, Miss.

Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Through Nov. 30

It's hard to locate a clear chronology in the show, and in fact the curator, Dilys Blum, has not attempted one. In his five years of high-flying success Kelly was juggling numerous gigs at once. A steady evolution is not to be found at such a fast and furious pace. Instead we meet a designer enjoying his first spotlight and growing stronger the longer he's in it, grabbing bright color straight from the spectrum and honoring his inspirations with intense and sometimes comic brio. The exhibition of 80 ensembles, contained in one large gallery that is divided into six sections, has the feeling of a five-year party. Film footage of Kelly's sassy fashion shows, well-spaced above the clothes, adds to the atmosphere of ascent.

Early pieces in the section called "Fast Fashion" are on the simple side, best exemplified by two knit tube dresses from 1985, one lemon-yellow, one turquoise. These body-hugging, minimally structured dresses look as if they really were made on the run. But each boasts a bold stroke: a ladder of bows up the back of the yellow; a nod to Paul Gauguin in the knotted front closures of the blue. The next section, "Hot Couture," shows Kelly upping his construction in homage to couturiers Coco Chanel, Madame Grès and Elsa Schiaparelli. They're fun, these madcap tributes, if a bit of an endgame. Kelly revered Madame Grès, the woman who brought Grecian draping to a state of higher mathematics, but he was much more like Schiaparelli, whose focus on surreal surface embellishment came at the expense of innovative cut. Kelly wasn't experimental when it came to cut, but he was already a master of embellishment—not an easy achievement in the realm of ready-to-wear.

The sections "Lisa Loves the Louvre" and "Two Loves" pull ensembles straight from Kelly's final two collections, Spring/Summer 1989 and Fall/Winter 1989-90. The work is all over the place—too many ideas, perhaps—yet "Two Loves," an ode to both Paris and America, contains an exquisite leopard-print bodysuit with sarong that suggests a coming maturity and restraint. More interesting is the section "Mississippi in Paris," a group of designs inspired by Kelly's deep-South childhood, his adoration of Josephine Baker, and his take on racial stereotypes. Here his ebullience has an edge: Not hostile; he simply refuses to comply. Sambo, Mammy, Aunt Jemima, pickaninny, golliwog. These stereotypes are now banned from usage as racist, but Kelly embraced them all, both word and image. He had an extensive collection of black memorabilia—pieces of it are on display in a vitrine near the entrance—and he often dressed in baggy denim overalls, a statement somewhere between semiotics and self-parody.

Kelly handled this tricky iconography deftly, playfully: Knit dresses with rag-doll bows. Denim overalls as shirtwaist dress. And the prints: Archival drawings of Baker in her "banana dance" costume, for instance, are worked into a Deco print in hot pink—very Paris between the wars. And the golliwog, which Kelly stylized and used as a company logo, is abstracted into a patterned fabric of white, yellow and cafe au lait, round faces reading like flowers. The 1986 dress Kelly made from this fabric, a sleeveless sheath with a flaring hem, is pure springtime—the slur subverted into beautiful blossoms. "If you don't know where you've been, you can't go too far," Kelly told Architectural Digest in 1989. One can't help wondering where Kelly would have gone with his African-American inheritance had he been given more time.

Down the center of the gallery a runway holds pride of place, the eponymous "runway of love." Five mannequins wear Kelly creations on which his signature heart shape doesn't miss a beat. One piece in particular is profound, a gown of black wool from the Fall/Winter 1988-89 collection, designed specifically for a touring fundraiser held by Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS. Sewn over the bust of the gown is a big red heart, but unlike the other bright and shining hearts in the show this one is fashioned from horizontal stitches that are rough, ragged. A long strand of red cotton thread is left hanging from the heart . . . unfinished. When Kelly made this dress he had already been diagnosed with AIDS. He would die a year later, at age 35, on the first day of a sadder, more cynical decade.

Ms. Jacobs writes on fashion design and history for Vanity Fair magazine.

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