Radical cheek: black camp, racial kitsch, and Patrick Kelly’s subversive fashions

Abstract

This doctoral research is the first comprehensive study of Patrick Kelly’s work. It examines the work of the late fashion designer who is most known for being the first American to be accepted into the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode in 1988 as well as his fashioning of black memorabilia – figures and images associated with racist depictions of black people – which he attempted to reclaim and redefine through camp ready-to-wear fashion. Kelly’s use of camp involved undermining the connotations of black memorabilia and its form with queer coding. I contextualize his design techniques and aesthetics, specifically his use of racialized imagery as mode of deconstruction and subversion, and center him as a designer-artist that unsettled whiteness in the fashion industry. My exploration of his work focuses on creating a discourse around his design processes and breaking down the elements of his appropriation of racial kitsch. Therefore, I situate Kelly within a predominately art historical and theoretical context that understands Kelly’s work as design-art. I deploy a semiotic/object-based analysis which situates Kelly’s practice within the contexts of wider queer visual tactics and black radical art making. Black radical art making is the techniques and visual narratives used by black artists to defy and confront black peoples’ history of subjection to whiteness, and Patrick Kelly operated in this realm of radicalism with his ready-to-wear creations.