Patrick Kelly: Fashions’ great black hope

When blackness is received by an industrial cultural organization it is subject to degradation of meaning and effect. Black designers wishing to operate in the upper echelons of the fashion industry must reconnoiter their positions by employing self-sabotage and offer less potent versions of operational blackness. This article unpacks how blackness is operated and mythologized within the Parisian fashion system. The authors investigate Patrick Kelly’s passage from obscurity to prominence as being in keeping with the Hegelian master–slave dialectic. The importance of this unpacking is timely as black fashion designers are increasingly breaching an exclusion zone that placed them formally outside the mainstream fashion system.