The world is still dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and, while some countries are slowly going back to normal, others are struggling with new cases, while we all fear a second and even more deadly wave.
So far the States had over 100,000 Coronavirus victims, but the attention in the last few days has shifted from the virus to the death of a man of colour, George Floyd, in police custody.
Floyd, 46, died on Monday in Minneapolis after a white officer handcuffed him, then kneeled on his neck for around nine minutes. A video recorded by a bystander asking to let him go, shows the horrific ordeal, with the officer kneeling on Floyd's neck while the man cries out, "I can't breathe".
Protests against police brutality erupted in various American cities, including Minneapolis, Denver, New York, Chicago, Oakland and Atlanta. As anger escalated, the police headquarters of the officers involved in the death were set on fire; US President Donald Trump in the meantime seemed busy posting incendiary tweets and, in one of them, he called the protesters "thugs".
Former vice-president and Trump's opponent in the presidential campaign in November, Joe Biden, spoke of a national emergency (that may also end up having another deadly consequence, spreading Coronavirus even more as the protests and gatherings attracted a lot of people).
Fashion can't do much to put an end to the plague of racism, but it can help us dissecting racism and reacting to it through the work of those designers, such as Patrick Kelly, who fought against it with energy and creativity.
The late African American designer made himself known for creating clothes in bold and bright shades, often characterised by hearts traced with colourful buttons.
Born in 1954 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, one of the most racist and violent states in America in the 1950s and '60s, Kelly fell in love with fashion through his mother and grandmother's magazines. Yet the magazines also struck him in a negative way as black women weren't featured in their pages.
Kelly learnt to sew in grade school and, after living, working and studying in New York, he moved to Paris in 1979. He arrived with almost no money and started selling his own designs on the street. Little by little, things started working out for him and he created costumes for the Parisian nightclub Le Palace and designed his first commercial collection in February 1985. Fashion conglomerate Warnaco signed an agreement to produce his designs in 1987 and, a year later, he became the first American and the first black designer to be voted into the prestigious Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode.
Kelly developed a joyful and playful aesthetic that was daringly as much as it was humorous: he mainly used vibrant colours and lively patterns that gave his designs an ironic and flamboyant twist. "I want my clothes to make you smile," he once stated, but his exuberant shows and his designs, like his body-conscious black dresses with hundreds of coloured buttons in different sizes forming heart-shaped bustiers, didn't just make you smile, they made you feel elated (remember the elegant velvet suit with a surreal nail-print that fastened with real metal nails?).
Nothing was casual, though, in Kelly's universe: his buttons were indeed a reference to his beloved grandmother, Ethel Rainey, who often used mismatched buttons to mend his shirts as a young boy. Once, after he complained, she started using the buttons also in a decorative way.
Besides, inspired by those magazines he had leafed through as a young boy, Kelly decided to create clothes for all women, celebrated in his shows with his diverse and inclusive cast of models.
New York and Paris mixed and combined in his looks: Kelly firmly had in mind cool street styles and graffiti art, but he had a soft spot for a very special muse - Josephine Baker - and an undivided admiration for iconic designers such as Madame Grès, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and Yves Saint Laurent.
In Paris Kelly also started collecting black memorabilia, such as advertising, dolls and other assorted items like Darkie toothpaste and figurines of Aunt Jemima. These objects strongly connected with racial stereotypes became the starting point for Kelly to push boundaries even further.
In the '80s Kelly reappropriated indeed the golliwog, a fictional black character originally taken from an English children's book from 1885 and turned it around, transforming it into his cartoonish logo, a face with big eyes and smiling lips, printing it on a white body-hugging dress with matching long gloves.
He also came up with Aunt Jemima bandana dresses, applied buttons on body-con jersey dresses that evoked the eyes and the smile of the golliwog, created accessories such as pickaninny doll earrings and necklaces and a hat in the shape of a watermelon slice (watermelons are a major symbol in the iconography of racism in the States).
Having experienced racism as a child in pre-civil rights Mississippi, Kelly, who studied art history and African American history at Jackson State University, conceived the memorabilia he collected and the symbols he used in his designs as ways to think about his own experience and confront questions of race.
By reappropriating these symbols of black oppression, the designer wondered if he could tell through them another tale, not a story of oppression but of liberation, achieved through fashion. Using symbols like the golliwog on his shopping bags, with his name in bold letters was his own way of subverting stereotypes, while asserting his place not just in society, but in the universe of fashion as well.
Kelly's life was cut short by AIDS: the designer died on January 1, 1990, so this year also marks the 30th anniversary of his death.
Kelly is buried in the 50th division of Paris's Père-Lachaise cemetery and his tomb is easily recognisable as it is engraved with his logo.
His friend and feminist activist Gloria Steinem, stated at his memorial, "Instead of dividing us with gold and jewels, he unified us with buttons and bows."
At the moment it does seem impossibly difficult to be unified in a world divided by racism and by the social and economic inequalities deepened by Coronavirus. It does seem implausible, unimaginable and unattainable, but, as the epitaph on Kelly's grave states, "Nothing Is Impossible".
Comments