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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.