Buttons

He was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on September 24, 1954, and grew up watching his grandmother iron the cocktail dresses of the Black women who came back from working in white households. He moved to Atlanta in 1974, dressed Iman for her first Atlanta runway in 1976, drove a Volkswagen Beetle to New York with $200, and arrived in Paris in 1979 with a one-way ticket bought by an Air France flight attendant named Pat Cleveland. In 1988 he became the first American admitted to the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode. He died of an AIDS-related illness on New Year's Day 1990 at thirty-five.

Vivien Beauchamp's biography traces the arc through the Vicksburg grandmother's lessons, the Atlanta apprenticeship at Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, the New York Parsons rejection, the Paris arrival and the early Le Palace nights, the 1985 Patrick Kelly Paris debut, the watermelon and golliwog motifs that his white critics did not at first know how to read, the 1988 Vogue black-models cover, the Elle cover, the Chambre admission, and the bedside vigil of his partner Bjorn Amelan at the American Hospital of Paris in late 1989.

What emerges is a portrait of a Mississippi-born fashion designer whose five Paris seasons remade what an American Black designer could be and whose death at thirty-five made the Brooklyn Museum's 2014 retrospective the recovery project it has continued to be.