There are designers who make clothes, and there are designers who make language — who take a button, a bow, a swatch of Black joy stitched into gingham, and turn it into a sentence the world is still learning to read. Patrick Kelly was the latter. Nearly three decades after his passing, his syntax is everywhere: in the boldness that lets a designer wink instead of whisper, in the audacity to put Black womanhood at the center of Paris and dare anyone to look away.
Two events this month invite us to sit inside that legacy a while longer — a conversation in Atlanta, and a premiere on the film festival stage.
Event One: Style Is a Witness: Why Fashion Journalism Matters
Thursday, August 13 | 6:30–8:30 p.m. Auburn Research Library of African American Culture and History
On Thursday, August 13, the Auburn Research Library of African American Culture and History opens its doors for Style Is a Witness: Why Fashion Journalism Matters — less a panel than a homecoming, a room full of people who understand that fashion, at its best, is memory made wearable.
I come to this conversation as Senior Fashion Editor at Upscale Magazine, but also, more simply, as someone who believes fashion journalism owes a debt to the designers who made the beat worth having. Moderated by the inimitable Isoul Harris, our panel will sit with the harder questions — not just who was Patrick Kelly, but what do we, as storytellers, owe to the archive he left behind? Joining that conversation:
Darralyn Hutson, media strategist
Provie Fulp, Emmy-nominated costume designer
Assia Shamir Ferguson, multimedia fashion journalist
B.J. Arnett, Department Chair, Clark Atlanta University
Patrick Kelly's story resists the amnesia fashion so often demands of itself. The industry loves a season; it is less faithful to a legacy. But journalists, curators, and cultural stewards are in the business of refusing that forgetting — of insisting that a life's work doesn't expire when the trend cycle turns.
📍 Auburn Research Library of African American Culture and History 🗓️ Thursday, August 13 | 6:30–8:30 p.m. Register here
Event Two: Opening Night Premiere — Love, Patrick
Friday, August 21, 2026 | 6:45 PM EDT Kenny – Tara Atlanta
Love, Patrick: Nothing is Impossible
LOVE, PATRICK uncovers the extraordinary rise of Patrick Kelly, the first American admitted to the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter, and examines how a joyful, southern, Black designer reshaped fashion while confronting race, identity, and mortality.
The timing is no accident. Love Patrick, the documentary chronicling Kelly's life and the singular current of joy and defiance that ran through his work, has just been named a featured selection of Opening Weekend at the 17th BronzeLens Film Festival — August 21–23, 2026, in Atlanta. A screening, yes. But also something closer to a reckoning: proof that the industry is finally ready to reckon with just how much of its present tense Kelly wrote.
Love Patrick is not, in the end, a film about clothes. It is a film about what outlasts them.
I'm grateful to be counted among the voices featured in this film, and even more grateful to the team who carried the larger story across the finish line. Kelly's career was never a moment. It was a frequency — one that four people, in particular, worked tirelessly to keep transmitting.
Jess Manning, producer, brought the discipline and heart required to shepherd a story this personal from idea to screen — the kind of steady hand a legacy like Kelly's demands.
Ray Cornelius, producer, calls the film nothing short of a revolution. "Fashion is a language," he says, "and Patrick gave it a new dialect."
And the film's creative directors, the Horne Brothers, built the visual world that lets Kelly's joy and defiance leap off the screen. As they put it: "This is not just a film. It is a movement."
Four different roles, one shared conviction — that Patrick Kelly's story deserved the full weight of their craft.
📅 AUG 21–23, 2026 | Opening Weekend, 17th BronzeLens Film Festival Love Patrick will be featured as part of Opening Weekend.
So consider this a double invitation — to the fashion lovers, the cultural historians, the archivists of Black creativity who know that some legacies don't fade, they compound. Come sit with us on August 13. Come witness on August 21. Come see how one designer, working in a language entirely his own, is still teaching the rest of us how to speak.
With gratitude, and with reverence for the ones who taught us to dress our truth out loud,
