Photographs of la sape, the Congolese sartorial subculture, often have a particular quality when appearing in Western media. They feature clothes the movement is known for: brightly coloured suits and ties, crisp patterned socks and pocket squares, occasionally, accessories like tobacco pipes, bowler hats and canes, which seem to parody colonisers of yore. But the outfits stick out not only because they are brilliantly assembled, but because of the contrasting surroundings: dirt roads, faded clothes lines, overflowing trash cans, barefoot children. They are almost always taken outdoors, usually the streets of Kinshasa or Brazzaville.¹ ‘Living in Poverty and Spending a Fortune to Look Like a Million Dollars,’ summed up the title of a 2015 documentary by RT, the Russian English-language television network.² Sapeurs, a 2014 documentary short sponsored by the beer company Guinness, gave the disparity between subject and surrounding an uplifting spin. ‘[Sapeurs] have a simple philosophy,’ a voice-over narrator explains. ‘To defy circumstance, and to live with joie de vivre.’³

Sapeurs produce their own media, too. It is different in style and tone from outsiders’ efforts. The French-language YouTube videos in which Ben Moukacha appears present the restauranteur and his fellow sapeurs, members of the Congolese diaspora in Paris, as celebrities. In one interview, he and a journalist dine in a restaurant, chatting as a bottle of champagne chills in an ice bucket.⁴ In another, by the Congolese web-TV series Ziana, Moukacha stands in the Brazzaville airport as a camera follows his every gesture, paparazzi style.⁵ Moukacha immigrated to Paris in the eighties, and this video captures his homecoming after thirty years in France. He recites a prayer: Glory to you, sapelogie. Beneficent be your science. You to whom I’ve given my body soul and spirit, protect me from bandits who want to harm my clothes!⁶

Moukacha delivers these lines with dead seriousness, only breaking character and grinning when his entourage applauds. Recently, I asked him what he thought of outside media coverage of la sape, both by journalists and documentarians and in culture at large. (Solange Knowles’ 2012 music video, ‘Losing You,’ featured Congolese sapeurs living in South Africa; Paul Smith’s spring/summer 2010 collection was inspired by the sapeurs photographed in the book Gentlemen of Bakongo, by Italian photographer Daniele Tamagni.) ‘I don’t think it’s bad,’ Moukacha said. ‘But it often passes over the phenomenon, speaking only about the festive parts, about the joy and the parties. La sape is not just about clothes.’

Moukacha’s online persona is akin to a movement intellectual; He’s fond of inventing new words and concepts to theorise la sape, and discussing them with pomp and circumstance.⁷ When we meet, our surroundings – his small, cosy restaurant on the rue de Clignancourt – do seem to belie his larger-than-life moniker: ‘billionaire in clothes.’⁸ But looks aren’t everything, he reminds me. ‘Behind every image is a discourse.’

***

I created the concept of ‘sapelogie,’ a neologism which means the science of la sape, after the two civil wars in the Republic of Congo. In 1998, people were speaking about peace. Thinking about my country, I had the idea: What can we do for the youth who bore arms? A new concept, a new ideology, was necessary. At the same time, it had to be something they knew already, which was innate. Which is la sape. La sape is an acronym: Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes.⁹ Sapelogie is a neologism to nourish the movement. We have the ten commandments of sapelogie. There’s no violence. There are no ethnic distinctions. When one is a sapelogue, you’re not on drugs. You’re not an alcoholic or a gigolo. You don’t who have mistresses all over the place. Because you are so anchored in clothing, you are straight. If you follow two rabbits at once, you’ll never catch one.

Where the politician can’t go is exactly where I am. Where people are wounded and fighting, the sapelogue separates them, saying make peace. We’re like people of the church. I consider myself an educator of the street. When young people see you, they come with a smile. You represent change.

La sape is very old. We can trace it to 1922, to Andre Matsoua [a critic of French colonial policy who lived between Paris and Brazzaville, known for his pinstriped suits]. And there were many other soldiers from the first and second world wars. When we attained independence, it continued, because of politicians and bureaucrats who were sapeurs. In the beginning it specifically was anchored in the neighbourhood of Bakongo in Brazzaville. Then it took over the city and the country; it’s like the riots in 2005 in France, spreading from quarter to quarter among the young.

Every Congolese child is a sapeur. You shouldn’t ask when I became one. The point is that I’m still one. Some practice a bit and others practice deeply. I’m very deep in it. It’s true that europeans do it well, too, especially the English, French and Italians.  I don’t know if Americans are in it. They’re more about jeans.

There’s an education. You have to shower, cut your hair; When you get older, your parents buy your clothes. And the child sees his parents get dressed up, and he learns. We have a system that’s called ‘mine.’ That means, we borrow a piece of clothing from a cousin or a neighbour to make a reglage. Reglage is sapelogical jargon for an outfit whose components are in harmony. There are some which don’t have the money to practice this art; they do it because it’s inside them. You can wear something that’s €50, and be a sapelogue.

I came to Paris in 1983. I was in an orchestra that played Rumba, singing harmony. At the same time, I went to school, and I was a sapeur. In Paris, the goal was to perfect the vestimentary arts. So I had to connect the useful to the pleasurable, and attain a good scholarly level in order to get a good salary. I thought I’d be a civil engineer, or a university professor; there was a lot of capriciousness. In the end, I did something which wasn’t linked to my studies. I have a bachelor’s degree in mathematics.

When I first arrived in Paris, there was solidarity. There was a subculture. I wouldn’t ever leave another sapeur in distress. And this is in spite of certain exchanges, certain language that you might have noticed. To boude is part of la sape. It’s a kind of competition, where you exchange words with another sapeur to discourage him, for instance, saying that his outfit is worth less. It’s part of sapelogie, but it’s nothing like real disputes. There are never any actual fights.

I hope that la sape can become an industry in Congo. It’s a political question. Brazil didn’t create football, but it’s become the home of football, like the French and Camembert. But our leaders need to put structures in place to create new, modern fabrics. People at home ask us, why when you’re living in Paris would you wear clothes by European brands, instead of promoting African ones? There needs to  be visibility. Whether it’s an African brand or another brand, you need to make an effort. African tissues haven’t evolved beyond being ancestral. We’re not going to continue with raffia forever.

La sape should be accessible to everyone. Descartes says that every philosophy should be a philosophy without fear. Which means that when you believe in something, you shouldn’t avoid it. The paths of sapelogie are impenetrable to all who don’t know the rule of three [which instructs sapeurs not to wear more than three hues at once].¹⁰ Colours transmit a message. For us, clothing speaks. Fashion in general is out of fashion. One day it’s enormous rings, the next day they’re gone. La sape is beyond fashion; it’s like the earth. You’re born dust and you die dust. You’re born and we lose you as well.

I have children. The oldest is eighteen; the youngest is three. The fact that my son is a sapeur means he respects others and institutions. He’s not going to bust up a telephone booth for his pleasure. One day he told me, Papa, thanks for making me a sapeur. I responded; I didn’t make you a sapeur. You’re born this way. You’re doing what the Congolese tradition has always asked of you.

If we wear nice clothes, it’s like everybody. When you have a gentlemen who buys a beautiful car that costs a million francs, no one criticises him. But when a sapeur buys a €5,000 suit it’s a problem? Everyone has his own tastes. Everyone has his own passions. You have people who spend all of their savings from the whole year on a vacation that lasts one month. I’m a sapeur, and I buy clothes instead of going on two months of vacation. While others dance, we buy clothes.

One day on television, there was a show about a lady who loved having sixty cats at her house. I was with my wife, who started to say she was crazy and needed to go to the hospital. I told my wife that she didn’t understand anything. That woman is like me.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor. In 2011, she spent the summer interviewing Parisian sapeurs as part of the Brown University research fellowship, Global Conversation.

1. See: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-25783245, https://sites.duke.edu/globalfrance/alain-mabanckou/le-contexte-politique-et-social-de-lecriture/la-culture-des-sapeurs/ and http://www.coolhunting.com/culture/gentlemen-of-ba ↩

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W27PnUuXR_A ↩

3.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2O5yfw20Yg ↩

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiVyn_PqA18 ↩

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2dmx6fGvUo ↩

6. All translations from the French by the author. ↩

7. The bravado hasn’t gone unchallenged. Moukacha is the target of several recent video critiques by Norbat de Paris, a younger sapeur who dresses in trendier styles – aviator glasses, slim-fit suits – and also fashions himself a movement intellectual (‘Je roucoule, je broie la langue de Molière, PUTAIN DE MERDE!’). See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcJgSeNT9zk. ↩

8. In French: Le milliardaire en vêtement. ↩

9. In English: Society of ambianceurs and elegant people. ↩

10. In French: la trilogie des couleurs achevees et inachevees. ↩

SOME THIRTY YEARS AGO on July 22, 1985, Pierre Cardin sent nine young Chinese girls down the runway of his show in Paris. The moment marked the significant changes that had occurred in Chinese fashion and its encounter with the West, as well as offering a glimpse of the future of China’s industry.

Cardin’s girls were the first Chinese models to travel overseas and walk for a Western designer, their arrival in Paris earmarked an event in cultural history. Yet, the fact that this had even happened was in itself the culmination of a much longer process Cardin espoused in 1979. Cardin’s contribution, and reason for his stature in narratives of Chinese fashion history, stems from his diplomatic relationship with the Chinese government. In 1976 China began to look seriously into expanding its textile and clothing industry and sought to consult with foreign designers. After being invited to China in 1978, Cardin was appointed Fashion Consultant by the Communist government. The role was, in the designer’s words, to ‘advise the Chinese on how to style their textile products to make them more marketable to the West.’¹

Cardin’s relationship with China was for the country’s government, premised on economic considerations, but the designer was also enthused by the economic potential of the Far East, declaring: ‘if I can produce one button for every Chinese, that’s 900 million buttons.’² Cardin envisaged that this new position could open up the possibility for Chinese manufactured ready-to-wear products under the Cardin label. Yet, the designer also saw the opportunity for bringing Western ideas on fashion to the Chinese public.

It was not as if China had no experience of fashion shows – Shanghai had seen the first back in 1909. Even after China turned Communist in 1949, there had still been a state-approved fashion show in 1956 before the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) ended such allegedly bourgeois activities. But the newly appointed Cardin proposed to put on the first fashion show by a Western designer in the People’s Republic of China, and he was determined to do it in grand style.

In 1979 he flew some two hundred and twenty outfits from his archive, and a dozen models to China, and unleashed them onto a Chinese audience wholly unprepared for what they were about to see.

Chinese officials, uncertain of how the audience would react, banned the press from attending, and restricted those present to industry cadres.³ But naturally public and media interest was high, and journalists fought through a crowd to gain entrance. Inside, the audience was stunned into silence by the show. John Fraser, a Western reporter at the event, described what he saw: ‘see through blouses, dresses slashed down the side to expose the handsome flanks of Parisian models, gentlemen in thigh-tight pants, [and] space-age shoulder pads.’⁴ So exotic was the display that Western diplomats were shocked by the contrast to China’s sartorial norm: Mao suits. Cardin’s theatrics had succeeded in presenting a sartorial alternative to enforced uniformity of the Maoist era. They were post-Mao now, so Cardin offered a vision of post-Mao suit too.

Cardin followed this fashion show, and several others he staged subsequently, with entrepreneurial commercial ventures in China. By 1983, his designs were being manufactured in dozens of factories across the country. This development made sense to his business, which he continued to run from his Paris studio: labour was cheap, as were raw materials. Even so, Cardin’s plan to capitalise on China’s production advantages did not work out. The problem was that the Chinese were naïve to Western fashion economics. Buyers discovered that Chinese officials vastly overpriced Cardin-licenced products and insisted on high prices.

Nevertheless, Cardin had been successful in demonstrating that fashion was about much more than manufacturing. Though Chinese officials had been wary about the negative cultural influence of Cardin’s futuristic shows, it was the cadres from the textile and garment industry who were most affected. After holding shows in the late Seventies, Cardin proposed developing Chinese models to the officials who began the establishment of a ‘modelling team’ to present local fashion. Not long after, in November 1980, the Shanghai Garment Company duly assembled the first group of official Chinese fashion models. Chosen from workers in garment factories, these girls were selected with rigid criteria concerning their physical characteristics. Their selection represented the prevailing ideas amongst industry officials of an ideal appearance; according to Christine Tsui’s China Fashion: Conversations with Designers they had to be 1.64m in height, with a 80cm/60cm/80cm ratio in the bust/waist/hips.

For most of Chinese society, unfamiliar with Western fashion, the idea that women would display themselves and essentially use their bodies to sell clothing was unthinkable. Worse still, were the Western designs that were often considered vulgar by conservative Chinese (especially parents), many of which bore prominent shoulders, cleavage, and legs.

Apart from societal criticism, Chinese modelling in the early Eighties was not a particularly welcoming profession. Models were poorly paid and expected, not only to be fashion models, but model citizens and public identities to the PRC. As state-media bizarrely suggested in 1982, Chinese models were ‘working to promote the Four Modernisations rather than merely satisfying vulgar and inferior tastes.’⁵ With sport-like rigour, models had to undergo lessons in movement, makeup techniques, sewing and also physical fitness training. They were patronisingly named ‘fashion performance teams’ by Chinese officials. Yet, in spite of all this, the selection of trained models debuted in February 1981, at the Shanghai Friendship Movie Theatre, where the new models showed garments produced by the local Shanghai factories. This was precisely what the Shanghai Garment Company cadres had intended – Chinese models modelling Chinese-made products to foreign buyers.

In 1981 Cardin returned to China to stage his largest show ever at the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing, and with the direct support of Beijing’s Vice Mayor – who was, of course, happy to assist an ‘old friend’ of the Chinese government. This show, as it turns out, was on the right side of history. Chinese interest in fashion was by now on an upward trend: the country’s first fashion magazine, Shizhuang (translating to ‘Fashion’) was published in 1980, while the first degree program in clothing design had also been established. Fashion became a litmus test between the more conservative China, and the emerging, younger China.

Perhaps this dichotomy was only to be expected. The older generations had seen first hand during the Cultural Revolution how apparently progressive ideas could give way to radicalism – and violence. While the youth had grown up in an era of socialistic uniformity in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, a time that suppressed desires for individual expression. Cardin’s activities were in line with the more progressive and youthful sentiments in Chinese society, for both his and Chinese fashion’s benefit.

In subsequent years Western fashion in China went from strength to strength. Fashion benefitted from its coherence with progressive discourse as an expression of personal preference, and not ‘ideological principles’.⁶ Moreover, the Party itself seemed to be changing its mind and fashion became a vehicle for these narratives. In the Summer of 1983, the Shanghai modelling team received an invitation to stage a show for the Party leadership in Zhongnanhai – the heart of Chinese government in Beijing. This was unprecedented and never to be repeated, but their approval of the event soon became public. The Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, gave a ringing endorsement of the show with an editorial entitled ‘innovative fashion, brilliant performance.’⁷ Since the Party leadership themselves approved of fashion, then surely it could not be ‘bourgeois liberalism’ – or for that matter, immoral.⁸

Chinese fashion was beginning to come into its own. Other clothing and textile companies imitated the Shanghai example and developed their own modelling teams, as Chinese designers became more adventurous. In July 1984, the Liaoning Province Silk Corporation held its own fashion show in Beijing, sending out models – with ‘Thriller’ playing overhead – in what reporter Allen Abel called, ‘Punk Mao’.⁹ The show, which featured traditional Communist garb, such as People’s Liberation Army caps, refashioned in what was, in effect, a microcosm of the developments in Chinese fashion.

On 23 May 1985, Cardin returned to China to stage his largest show ever once again at the Workers’ Stadium in Beijing. More than 10,000 flocked to watch Chinese models display his latest collection – accompanied by a twenty-member orchestra – in a catwalk show that featured ‘bare midriffs, V-cut backs, velvet tuxedos, gowns with matching coolie hats’ and a white wedding dress with an extremely long train for the finale.¹⁰

Following the spectacular 1985 event Cardin sought to bring a group of Chinese models to Paris. He would dress them in qipao (traditional dress), and bring Chinese culture, and style, to the West. At Paris Fashion Week, Cardin, with permission from the Chinese government, sent the nine models onto the runway of his show the same year with tremendous results. As The Times of London noted:

‘Nine Chinese models stepped shyly out on the catwalk in Paris yesterday and stole the Pierre Cardin show. Cardin, who is helping the Chinese to turn their silk production into a fashion industry, hand picked the prettiest girls. But there was nothing Eastern about the clothes, which were all Parisian miracles of couture cutting – coats that grew into capes, ponchos composed out of pleats and the famous Cardin collars unfolding like lotus flower petals around the exquisite head of twenty-two year-old Shi Kai, a student from Beijing.’¹¹

Shi Kai, in fact, closed the show for Cardin, wearing a ‘white brocade wedding dress.’¹²

Perhaps only Pierre Cardin could have managed to push Chinese fashion onto the global stage in this way since he had access to the platform to do so, and a unique diplomatic alliance with the government to use it.

Cardin did not see a profit on all his activity in China until later in the 1990s.¹³ But if there was a reward in all of this for the designer, it was in terms of something unquantifiable. Cardin helped to establish the Chinese fashion industry, and in so doing, changed the Chinese fashion industry, helping it become the giant it is today. While Cardin would eventually make money from his investment in the Chinese fashion industry, and his businesses in China would expand dramatically, his greatest achievement, and his great service to the Chinese, was to help lay the foundations for their cultural engagement with fashion.

Jin Li Lim is a researcher and PhD student on Chinese history at the London School of Economics.

1. Frank Prial, ‘China names Cardin as Fashion Consultant’, 08/01/1979, New York Times; ‘Landed pact with Chinese, Cardin says’, 09/01/1979, New York Times. ↩

2. Richard Morais, Pierre Cardin: The Man Who Became A Label, Transworld, London, 1991, p. 194. ↩

3. Under the PRC’s dual party-government system, where the Communist Party is at the heart of state and political power, a ‘cadre’ is an official, who, more often than not, is also a party member. ↩

4. Idem. ↩

5. Wu Juanjuan, Chinese Fashion: From Mao to Now, Berg, New York, 2009, p. 157. ↩

6. Wu Juanjuan, Chinese Fashion: From Mao to Now, Berg, New York, 2009, p. 15. ↩

7. This is my translation of《新颖的时装，精彩的表演》as quoted in, Meng Hong, ‘Xin zhongguo shoujia shizhuang biaoyuan dui’, Chuan cheng, No. 7 (2010), p. 9. ↩

8. Idem. ↩

9. Allen Abel, ‘Chinese fashion begins to shed drabness’, 30/07/1984, The Globe and Mail. ↩

10. ‘New stores by Cardin’, 11/06/1985, Associated Press. ↩

11. ‘Fashion (Paris fashion): Bonjour richesse’, 23/07/1985, The Times. ↩

12. Bernadine Morris, ‘The effect is lavish as Paris Couture opens’, 23/07/1985, New York Times ↩

13. ‘In the world, my name stays at first—Pierre Cardin’, 28/12/2009, East Day. ↩