Dressing the likes of Grace Jones (pictured) and Madonna in the 1980s, Patrick Kelly used playful pop-culture references throughout his work. Having grown up in Mississippi, he also addressed the racism of his Southern childhood using contentious imagery such as golliwogs. Prempeh describes this as ‘his way of confronting that history’ but, she notes, ‘he faced pushback from the Black community’. Responding to the controversy, Kelly said to Vogue in 1989: ‘If you don’t know where you’ve been in your history, then you don’t know where to go.’
Photograph: © Gilles Decamps. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Janet & Gary Calderwood, & Gilles Decamps, 2014