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Months before a show, Kelly is in high gear. Red sweat pants peeping from under the overalls, he sits high at his drafting table, drawing in deft strokes, crumpling up sketches one after another and sipping hot tea from a tall glass. Interruptions are constant. "No!" he barks, surveying a list of proposed models. "We need someone with de vraies fesses -- a real fanny." The sultry beauties who glower through most French fashion shows must learn to prance, dance, skip and even smile for Kelly's semiannual follies. He dismisses another candidate offhandedly: "Tell her she can do my show if she stops doing drugs." Meanwhile, the designer darts in and out of the sewing room, nipping a tuck here and pinning a fold there on a muslin pattern. Later, salesmen unload briefcases of fabrics. Kelly picks up a purple knit. He smells it. "Combien?" he inquires. The answer: 125 francs ($20) per meter. "Why so much?" Kelly challenges. The bargaining is serious: Kelly, whose dresses run from $395 to $2,200, builds his business on providing a less expensive alternative to other Paris-based designers.
From the first sketch to the moment he spray-paints his red heart on the runway, Kelly wrestles with the tiniest details. Two hours before the last show, he was backstage in the Louvre tent amid models, dressers, seamstresses, hairdressers, makeup artists, lighting technicians and stagehands. "Paint those red lips!" he ordered. "I want you to look like you just got rid of your third husband!" Dashing through mounds of hats decorated with rhinestone Eiffel Towers, past racks of pink minks, turquoise ostrich feathers, Mexican blankets and red sequined gowns, he fusses with a model's hair. He directs a seamstress to stitch a new lining in a fur cape. Three minutes before showtime, Kelly joins hands with everyone for a revival-style prayer: "Thank God for making us be together," he says. "You make me so happy." The group bursts into cheers of "Yay! Yay!" and the music flicks on to the opening song, Real Love.
While Kelly builds a celebrity clientele with the likes of Bette Davis, Paloma Picasso and Jane Seymour, he works hard to keep a high profile: off to a fashion-power AIDS banquet one night, to the opening of Regine's new nightclub another. The publicity game is paying off. Licensing negotiations for Kelly furs, sunglasses and jewelry are under way. The designer is looking for rental space to house a museum for his collection of 6,000 black dolls. Paris Match featured a six-page spread of Grace Jones posing in Kelly's clothes. Michael Douglas stopped by to chat about making a movie based on his career. At the Louvre, television cameras from West Germany, Canada, Japan and the U.S. trailed the designer. "What's the message?" inquired a correspondent. "It's a heavy glamour trip," Kelly explained. Then past the clothes bite and on to the personality bite. "Are you growing up?" she demanded abruptly. "No," said Kelly. "I'm having fun."