Patrick Kelly (fashion designer)

Kelly grew up in Mississippi and only found success after moving to Paris, where his joyful dresses covered in buttons became his signature, a nod to the shirt buttons he kept losing as a child. In 1988 he became the first American designer admitted to the Chambre Syndicale, the body that governs French ready-to-wear. His work also took on racially loaded imagery such as watermelon motifs and turned it toward celebration, which keeps it among the most debated fashion of the 1980s. He died in 1990, so the whole of his influence rests on a few short, dazzling seasons.