A deep-dive into Kerby Jean-Raymond's couture debut, 'what about Patrick Kelly?' and where Jay Jaxon fits into it all.
As the lampshade millinery dripping in crystals, hot roller cloak and fridge facade finale dress adorned with magnets spelling out, “But who invented Black trauma?” slipped back into the Villa Lewaro estate to close out the historic Pyer Moss Couture show earlier this month, in came the reviews, the pronouncements, the questions.
Within the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, which oversees Paris’ Haute Couture Week, there are three categories of brands that can show: The 16 haute couture maisons that qualify for the designation ; seven not-originally-Paris-based maisons , and a group of guests invited to show each season which, this time around, included Jean-Raymond’s Pyer Moss. The aim, at least in part, with the guest designers is to keep couture alive. Which also opens the storied art form to reinvention.
While Kelly created and sold couture, doing so outside of the confines of the Chambre and its definitions and regulations meant, for all intents and purposes according to those at the upper echelons of fashion, it didn’t really count. “I didn’t know he called it ‘mock couture,’ but I know he did show it [in 1988]…It was a lot of long gowns and he felt very happy to be in the Chambre Syndicale and he wanted, eventually, to make couture gowns. But he did ‘mock couture’ because they were something similar to pret-a-porter, just more elaborate,” she said of the designer, who died in 1990. “At the time, your standards were a lot different than these new kids out here that call themselves haute couture people.
“We can think of him the same way we think of Olivier Rousteing for Balmain,” she said of that house’s creative director, who revived Balmain haute couture after a 16-year hiatus in spring 2019. “I think a large part of the reason why Jay Jaxon is not recognized is because of erasure.” Or forgo mentions of Hylan Booker, who took the helm in 1968 as head designer of the House of Charles Frederick Worth, the maison whose founder is credited as “the father of haute couture.”
His “Wat U Iz” collection, presented with more swagger than couture has likely ever seen, at the Irvington, N.Y., estate that once belonged to Madam C.J. Walker, the first self-made female millionaire in America, was more than looks to delight and adorn the wealthiest of wearers. Each piece was a tribute to Black innovators and their inventions that have been overlooked and undercelebrated in American history.
As Dapper Dan put it in an Instagram post celebrating the Pyer Moss Couture debut: “The ‘ESSENCE’ of fashion is the story your work tells, its [stet] your artistic voice for awareness. We don’t make garments, we make testaments.”
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