Clothes to Make You Smile: Patrick Kelly Designs His Dreams

Casting the concept of “laughter through the hard parts” as a key to creative practice in this picture book debut, Pritchard pens a resilience-focused chronicle of fashion designer Patrick Kelly (1954–1990). When young Kelly loses a button and has to make do with what’s on hand, his grandmother covers his shirt in mismatched buttons so that his classmates will smile, not laugh. Inspired by this moment, the women in his life who wear elegant handmade clothes, and the fashion magazines that make him “feel alive,” he painstakingly learns to sew. Kelly’s unconventional designs take his Mississippi hometown by storm, but folks in bigger cities reject his designs as “too much.” So he sells coats on corners and serves meals to buy fabric, and after befriending fellow creators who love his style, he becomes the toast of Paris. When he directs the fashion show of his dreams, the audience can’t do anything but smile. Featuring a combination of fabric scraps, buttons, colored pencils, and miscellaneous ephemera, Wright’s mixed-media artwork captures the essence of Kelly’s dopamine-sparking aesthetic. Background characters are portrayed with various skin tones. More about the figure and an author’s note conclude. Ages 4–8. (Jan.)