(2 of 4)
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."