Patrick Kelly’s story is one of awe and inspiration. This African American Southerner, who was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, ultimately created an artistic vision that permeated Paris in the 1980s. His genius led to lucrative ready-to-wear opportunities that no other African American designer achieved at that time. In 1987, Kelly signed a multimillion dollar deal with Warnaco, which would enable him to manufacture his clothes to be distributed worldwide. Unfortunately, Kelly passed away from complications related to AIDS before his global fashion empire was able to come to fruition. As you engage with Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love, you will come across a variety of racist memorabilia that Kelly incorporated and commodified into his fashion lines. Depending on your positionality, you might experience those images differently. You may be triggered, traumatized, unaffected, curious, confused, and have an infinite amount of other feelings. The historical context of the images that Kelly used in his fashion is a vestige of the Reconstruction era in the United States following the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which attempted to end enslavement after the Civil War, even though it would be several years until the official end of enslavement. The South’s response was an all-hands-on-deck attack on Blackness. Just as African Americans began to hold positions of power in politics, business, and education, white racial terror and violence used to uphold enslavement transmuted into what is commonly called Jim Crow. This is the historical time frame that generated the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizen Councils, in addition to a racist media response that included the first feature-length film ever, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (ca. 1915). This important cinematic breakthrough of technical, narrative, and special-effect advancement portrayed Blacks as shiftless, lazy, and animalistic, and argued that granting freedom to Blacks and incorporating them into the fold of society as racial equals was a grave error. The film’s premise is the division of two families, one Union and the other Confederate, post–Civil War, and was the foundation of powerful, controlling images used to dehumanize Black people. In Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, he describes the characteristics and purpose of specific portrayals of African Americans. The pickaninny image, which Bogle describes as a character who was “a harmless little screwball creation whose eyes popped, whose hair stood on end with the least excitement and whose antics were pleasant and diverting” (Bogle 16), appears under the category of “coon.”
Patrick Kelly’s favorite Black American racist memorabilia was the golliwog, which is a subcaricature of the coon and pickaninny. The story of this caricature, like Kelly, has both American and European connections. The golliwog was the name of a blackface minstrel doll in Florence Kate Upton’s 1895 book, The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls. Though the book was published in London, the golliwog doll was inspired by the pickaninny minstrel dolls that Upton played with when she lived in New York. Ultimately, the tale and the golliwog were a hit in England and were used commonly in storybooks, also leading to the mass manufacturing of golliwog dolls by several toy companies (Pilgrim). During the late eighties, Patrick Kelly was known for incorporating a golliwog image on dresses, bags, hats, and stickers, just to name a few items. He would sometimes give them away at shows and to random people on the street. On his tombstone, a golliwog resides above a bright red heart. Arguably, the intention of any controlling image is to dehumanize. In this case, a golliwog suggests that Black people are childlike and implies that a paternalistic relationship with white America is necessary for order. So why might Kelly be drawn to the image? Kelly once said in an interview, “If we can’t deal with where we’ve been, it’s gon’ be hard to go somewhere.” Kelly was the first Black American fashion designer to sign a multimillion-dollar fashion deal. His designs and work were going to be globally distributed, and he was and continues to be heralded for his dynamic artistry.
