The Society of Ambiance Makers and Elegant Persons

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

This is 99% Invisible. I’m Christopher Johnson. It’s February 2nd, 2014, and you’re balancing a plate of wings and blue cheese dip on your lap, watching the Seattle Seahawks thrash the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl. Then during one of the commercial breaks, you see this ad. in the middle of the screen, it says Congo Brazzaville. There’s a group of men doing hard, dirty work, clearing fields and fixing cars.

GUINNESS AD:

In life, you cannot always choose what you do. but you can always choose who you are.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

Next thing you know, the ad cuts to a new scene. It’s the evening, and now we’re at a bar.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

This is producer Ryan Lenora Brown.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

A crowd has formed a circle around those same men, who have shed their dirty work clothes for coral pink, canary, and bright tangerine colored suits. One by one, the men proudly strut and pose, twirling their gold pocket watches, snapping their suspenders, and shooting their cuffs as the crowd cheers them. In the corner, a bartender smiles approvingly as he pours a glass of Guinness.

GUINNESS AD:

You see, my friends, with every brace and every cufflink, we say, “I am the master of my faith. I am the captain of my soul.”

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

Okay, so I admit, at first glance, it may seem a bit out of left field that a group of Congolese men dressed like an exquisitely elegant pack of highlighters is out here selling Irish beer during the Super Bowl.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

But actually, everyone from cinematographers to musicians to style mavens have finally been catching on to this loose knit collective of dandies called “sapeurs.” They’re from the central African cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa. And since the 1970s, they’ve been known for donning technicolor, three-piece suits with flamboyant accessories–like golden walking sticks and leopard print fedoras–and then cat walking through their city streets. In recent years, the sapeurs have blown up. Solange, Kendrick, and SZA have all featured sapeurs wars in their music videos. The iconic British men’s wear designer Paul Smith did a whole spring line of sapeur-inspired suits and bowler hats.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

If you want to be delighted, do a real quick image search. When you see the sapeurs, it’s obvious what makes them so attractive to famous artists and global brands. Their remix on classic men’s wear is irreverent and colorful and just a joy to look at. And these images are really different from the stereotypical way that Sub-Saharan Africa is often portrayed to the world. Those images depict the region as broke and broken. As an American journalist who’s worked here for the past decade, I’ve seen those stereotypes–we all have. And the reality is life in places like the Congo is really difficult, especially after centuries of brutal colonization, resource extraction, and underdevelopment.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

Into that bleak frame strolls the sapeurs–these Congolese mechanics and construction workers and farm hands dressed up like aristocratic peacocks, flaunting their Ferragamo monk strap shoes, silk Chanel scarfs and crisp Versace suits. For sapeurs, looking that clean is like two huge fuck yous–one for the cards they’ve been dealt, and the other to anyone who thinks those circumstances could ever define them.

SHANTRELLE LEWIS:

At the root of this is this phenomenon of having agency and using style.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

Shantrelle Lewis is author of the book Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, which features the sapeurs.

SHANTRELLE LEWIS:

Black men have taken the European suit and fashioned it with traditional African sensibilities. I’m talking about color. I’m talking about swag. I’m talking about using the European suit to defy their material conditions–defy their realities.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

For more than a century, Black dandies like the sapeurs have been engaged in what Shantrelle calls “dapper agitation.” It’s a counterintuitive kind of rebellion, right? Because in a way, formal wear is all about conformity. That’s why we call people “suits.” And jackets and ties came to this part of the world in a particularly ugly and violent way. They were brought by colonizers who made dressing European a precondition for being treated like a human being.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

But the sapeurs have flipped that script in dramatic fashion. They’ve taken the European suit–this thing that was forced on them–and made it wholly, authentically Congolese. And they’ve done it so well that now it’s the rest of us trying to wear our clothes to look like them.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

This radical fashion transformation began way before anybody in the Congo was calling themselves a sapeur. In fact, it started before the Congo was even a country of its own. It goes back to the first generations of Congolese men to put on suits and ties–men like Frederick Mpenda.

RYAN LENORA BROWN (FIELD TAPE):

OK, je dois être juste un peu près, ça va?

FREDERICK MPENDA:

Oui.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

It’s a sticky September day in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I’m sitting under a leafy mango tree in Frederick’s yard. He’s 89, dressed in the international off-duty grandpa uniform: a gray polo shirt and blue track pants. But 70 years ago, his fashion sense was a little different. Frederick flips open a photo album and points to a black and white picture. There’s a young man wearing a chic gray suit and tasseled loafers, holding a chunky baby with rolls like the Michelin Man.

FREDERICK MPENDA:

Ça, c’est moi.

RYAN LENORA BROWN (FIELD TAPE):

Oh, wow.

FREDERICK MPENDA:

C’est moi.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

“That’s me. That’s me,” he says, pointing to the man in the suit. He turns to another photo of himself. This one is from the 1950s. Frederick is sitting on his bicycle wearing a crisp, white button down and throwing the camera a brooding, serious gaze. His hair is close-cropped, and there’s a long, straight part running through it.

FREDERICK MPENDA:

Look at that part. We were always trying to imitate white people, even though our hair is nappy.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

Frederick talks casually about it now, but when this photo was taken, imitating how white people dressed was a matter of survival here. Back then, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or the DRC was a colony of the Belgians. They believed they needed to, quote, “civilize the primitive Congolese, making them less African and more white.”

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

Growing up in the 1940s, Frederick’s white school teachers made it crystal clear that the only way a Congolese boy like him could get ahead in life was to aspire to be as European as he possibly could. Frederick took their advice to heart. As a young man, he perfected his French. He got his diploma. And in the 1950s, he took a job with the colonial government in Leopoldville–what’s now Kinshasa.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

But of course, the Belgians were wild racists, who by this point had already spent more than a half century plundering Congo’s minerals using slave labor. They didn’t actually believe that someone like Frederick would ever be equal to them. So Frederick found himself continually having to prove how Belgian he could be, like when he applied to be an assistant to a colonial administrator.

FREDERICK MPENDA:

You first did a short exam. If you passed the exam, you went to the hospital so they could see if you were physically fit or not. If they decided you were fit, they handed you a little bottle of cologne

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

In a thousand ways, the Belgians tried to erase the Africanness of the Congolese. In order to succeed, you had to speak and act and even smell like a white person.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

This was especially true for Frederick. That’s because he was considered an “évolué,” which literally means an “evolved one.” That’s what the Belgians called a Congolese person who broke ties with their African identity and their community and instead adopted a European system of values. Évolué status gave people like Frederick access to education, jobs, and neighborhoods that most Congolese would never receive. But it also meant constantly being subjected to humiliating rituals.

FREDERICK MPENDA:

When you arrive at work, you would find a white man at the door. He would smell you. And if you did not smell good–if you did not wear the cologne–he will send you home. In our time, it was like that. You could not be unclean.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

Évolués were expected to speak crisp French, eat with a knife and fork, and go to mass on Sundays. Sitting with Frederick in his yard in Kinshasa, he explains to me that being an évolué meant having to look European too. It’s at this point in our conversation that he gets up and goes inside his house. When he comes back, he’s holding an armful of vintage suits. Frederick’s son, Kadhitoza–who was the chubby little baby Frederick was holding in that snapshot–has been sitting with us the whole time. He starts going through his father’s suits.

KADHITOZA:

Oui, ça c’est la couleur rouge bordeaux bordeaux, ça c’est la couleur saumon, hein? C’est très foncé. Et l’entrée là, je ne sais pas ce que je peux dire. Beige. Donc voilà.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

One is deep red–kind of Bordeaux. There’s a dark salmon pink one, a beige one… These suits date back to the ’50s. Back then, Frederick filled his wardrobe with them. He bought them secondhand from shops created specifically for so-called “évolués” like him. Frederick loved those suits. He still does, but they were also in some ways stifling–this elaborate European cosplay that many Congolese had to do just to be treated like human beings. So how do we get from that to the irreverence and joy and freedom of the sapeurs? I was led to the answer while sitting in notoriously awful Kinshasa traffic. One afternoon, I was trying to get to an interview when my taxi lurched to a stop–yet again–in front of an old shipping container. It had been converted into a shoe store. There was a sign outside featuring a life-sized photo of a middle-aged man in aviators dressed head to toe in black leather. It read: “PAPA GRIFFE, SUPREME MAGISTRATE AND SAPEUR OF THE STATE.” When I spoke with the Supreme Magistrate, I explained that I was trying to figure out exactly how suits of all things became such a vital form of self-expression in the DRC. Papa Griffe didn’t mention any tailors or designers. Instead, he pointed to something else as the origin of “La Sape,” as the sapeurs’ movement is known.

PAPA GRIFFE:

La Sape in this country was surrounded by music. La Sape came from this music.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

And then he said, “Let me show you.” So, the next night I followed Papa Griffe through a hole in a chain-link fence into a concrete courtyard. About a dozen guys were lounging with their instruments on overturned plastic drink crates. As we walked in, Papa Griffe’s band started to play. This is Congolese Rumba. Its roots date back to the 1940s, when Belgian officials were sniff testing évolués at the doors of their office jobs. Like the évolués, the musicians of that era also dressed in suits and ties. But unlike the évolués, their fashion frame of reference wasn’t white Belgians.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

Instead, Congolese artists took their fashion cues from Black American jazz musicians who had been dispatched to Leopoldville to play for U.S. troops during World War II. Locals also went to those shows and were awestruck by what they saw on stage.

DIDIER MUMENGI:

These Jazz artists were impeccably dressed in suits and bowties.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

Didier Mumengi is a Congolese writer, historian, and politician. He says that Congolese civilians used to go see these military bands in concert, and they loved how the Black American groups wore their western style suits.

DIDIER MUMENGI:

Noir comme le Congolais, mais qui s’habillent comme les Européens….s’habillaient mieux que les Européens.

RYAN LENORA BROWN (FIELD TAPE):

Mieux dans quel sens?

DIDIER MUMENGI:

Dans le sens du style.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

“What struck local artists,” Didier says, “was that the jazz men were Black like the Congolese, but they dressed like Europeans.” “In fact,” he says, “they dressed better than Europeans.” I asked him, “Better in what sense?” He said, “In the sense of style.”

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

Although jazz music never really took off in the Congo, jazz fashion definitely did. Congolese musicians quickly began to imitate the way that Black American artists dressed. Rumba fashion looked like it was straight out of Harlem–matching pinstripe suits, glossy loafers, colorful pocket squares…

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

The ingredients of these outfits were similar to what the évolués wore but with flashier colors and bigger accessories.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

For Congo’s department stores, this was awesome news. It meant the suit and tie was now verifiably cool. Store owners started hiring musicians as brand ambassadors who would wear their suits to concerts and bars and even sometimes sing about them to drum up business.

DIDIER MUMENGI:

And that’s how Congolese begin to equate music with dressing up. The musicians themselves made clothes a central element of the music.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

Over the next couple of decades, the music really took off as Congolese artists started touring the world. By the 1970s, rumba filled clubs from Kinshasa to Paris. Papa Griffe grew up in this era.

PAPA GRIFFE:

The musicians understood that they were in front of the world now, so they really wanted to look good.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

The patron saint of this music was a flamboyant singer with a high, haunting voice who went by the stage name Papa Wemba. As Papa Wemba toured the globe, he’d collect luxurious clothes by European and Japanese designers, adding new flamboyance to the more classic suit and tie look of rumba artists.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

He strutted on stage in checkered safari suits with pith helmets and neon yellow bell-bottoms with psychedelic print shirts. He was partial to denim, crushed velvet, and floor-length fur coats, which he wore even in the sticky tropical heat. And he loved, loved a fine tailored suit. Here’s Papa Wemba explaining in a 2004 documentary why he gravitated to such extravagant clothes early in his career.

PAPA WEMBA:

I wanted to be different because all the singers were doing the same thing. So I say to myself, “I must find a gimmick–turn everybody on.” You’ve got to turn the young people on.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

Fans were already used to seeing Congolese musicians as style icons. But at a talk he gave in 2015, Papa Wemba described how he and other rumba artists turned their shows into all-out fashion contests.

PAPA WEMBA:

In the 1970s, when we started our musical careers, there was a group of young people who came from Brazzaville to take part in the closing battle in Kinshasa.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

This is where we should clarify that there are two Congos. One is the DRC with the capital Kinshasa colonized by the Belgians. The other one–just across the Congo River–was colonized by the French. Its capital is Brazzaville.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

Rumba lovers would take ferries back and forth between the two cities, where there’d be fashion showdowns wherever Papa Wemba and other artists were performing. Well-dressed fans faced off, strutting and posing–showing off designer clothes–as crowds whistled and shouted for the best dressed.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

Those outfits often came from the overflowing closets of the musicians themselves. Rumba artists collected high-end fashion while on tour. And they’d often sell those pieces used to fans who scrimped and saved for months to buy them. Or fans would get other Congolese traveling abroad to bring designer European clothes back home to Kinshasa and Brazzaville.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

It’s not clear exactly who decided this cult of luxury fashion needed a name. But by the mid 1970s, its acolytes were calling themselves “sapeurs”–a play on “la sape,” a French slang word for clothing. The sapeurs added a Congolese flourish to the term by making S.A.P.E. an acronym that means the “Society of Ambiance Makers and Elegant Persons.”

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

La Sape was about dressing up to look good–to look elegant. It was also about the ambiance–the glow–that you, the sapeur, in your fine, beautiful formal wear, brought into the world. In one of Papa Wemba’s songs, Aissa Na Zoe, he has a line that’s become like a creed to the sapeurs. It goes like this: “What was he like? Well dressed, well shaved, well perfumed.”

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

That little hymn became shorthand for a much bigger philosophy–or Sapology. Unlike Papa Wemba, most Congolese rumba fans couldn’t really afford a closet full of silk shirts and designer suits. But the sapeurs believe that if you could find a way to dress expensively, the world would treat you like an expensive person–whether you were a famous rumba musician or a construction worker. Here’s Papa Griffe again.

PAPA GRIFFE:

Clothing changes a person. We recognize students are students by their uniforms. We recognize professional athletes by the jersey they wear. We know lawyers by the robes and doctors by the coats. You know a soldier when you see them because of the uniforms, too. This is how you know who someone is.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

To the sapeurs, fine formal wear announced to the world that you were the kind of person who deserved luxury. In the grand scheme, suits are a small thing. But La Sape formed as proof that anyone could be a person who mattered just by looking the part. For a lot of young Congolese, that idea was extraordinary–so extraordinary that it didn’t matter that you were going to have to totally break the bank to make it happen.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

That’s how Yinda Gabi felt. When she was 20 years old, in the early 1980s, she went to a Papa Wemba concert in Kinshasa. She watched as he walked on stage wearing a floor-length, black, Versace coat. And she just couldn’t stop looking at it. She says that when she saw that jacket, it was love at first sight–like a thunderbolt going through her.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

Yinda became a woman obsessed. Since Papa Wemba was a distant friend of the family, she approached him and asked if he’d sell her the jacket. He said, “Yes. For $100.” That was a lot of money. She was a young mother selling meat at a tiny market stall, making at most a couple dollars a day. But she immediately forked over her entire savings.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

Yinda never regretted her very expensive purchase. When she put on that jacket, people just looked at her differently. They spoke to her more respectfully. She felt tougher and braver. She became a sapeur.

YINDA GABI:

It transformed my life. It made me known.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

She began spending more and more money on clothes and swapping outfits with other sapeurs. She even gave herself a new name.

YINDA GABI:

I’m Yinda Gabi, but people know me as Mama Mineur.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

“Mama Mineur” basically means “youthful mother.” Women sapeurs are also known as sapeuses. When she joined the movement in the ’80s, there weren’t many. She’s still one of the few. Most of her clothes are what we think of as men’s wear. But she says in La Sape, it doesn’t work like that.

YINDA GABI:

A sapeur is a kind of rebel. In La Sape, there’s no difference between men’s and women’s clothes. There was a freedom for women and a freedom for men also. If a man wants to wear a skirt, he can wear a skirt.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

By the 1980s, the sapeurs had totally rebranded European formal wear. The Belgians had required Africans to wear suits to prove their Europeanness. American jazz artists, at least in the eyes of the Congolese, had worn suits to affirm their dignity. Sapeurs were defining suits and fine fashion again. They weren’t just cool, they were very Congolese. Coming up, the infamous dictator who tried to kill the sapeur’s vibes. That’s after the break. But first, here’s Roman with some ads. Not everyone loved Congolese people strutting around like the sapeurs in bright and flamboyant European formal wear.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

One person who hated the idea was the President, Mobutu Sese Seko. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Mobutu is notorious for his wild exploitation of the DRC. He conspired with the CIA to have the Congo’s First Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, assassinated. And when Mobutu took over in the mid1960s, he quickly became a kleptocratic dictator of note. He enjoyed riding his yacht down the Congo and chartering Concorde jets for weekend trips to his personal castle in Spain–stuff like that.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

Mobutu despised the way the Belgian colonists had tried to bleach the Congolese of their own cultures. Here he is explaining why he was fed up with Europe’s influence in the Congo.

MOBUTU SESE SEKO:

To exploit the Black man, the colonizer wiped out African traditions, languages, and cultures–in short, totally negating the Black man so that he thinks, speaks, eats, dresses, laughs, and breathes like a white man.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

As president, Mobutu took a hard turn towards nationalism. He changed the country’s name to Zaire–a word derived from an indigenous term for the Congo River. And he scrapped colonial city names like Leopoldville and Stanleyville.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

He also banned Western names, like Marie and Pierre. For him, the point was to rid Zaire of the symbols of Belgian colonialism. Mobutu called this new policy “authenticité.”

DIDIER MUMENGI:

Il avait pensé… un mouvement de décolonisation complète des esprits congolais.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

Congolese scholar Didier Mumengi says, “Mobutu thought of authenticité as a movement to completely decolonize the Congolese spirit.” For Mobutu, it was crucial that all Zairians show unwavering faith in his new program. In a documentary about Mobutu, he’s shown sitting on a throne made of carved wood and green velvet. The dictator is watching–pleased–as a room full of people robotically parrot lines, praising authenticité and Zaire.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

Mobutu also believed, like the sapeurs, that how you dressed was directly linked to who you were. But he wanted people to look Zairian. In his early days as the leader of Zaire–when he was hobnobbing with western kings and presidents–Mobutu typically wore a classic suit and tie.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

But in the early 1970s, he did a fashion 180. If you’ve ever seen a photo of Mobutu, there’s a very good chance he’s dressed as follows: his trademark leopard skin cap, big thick Buddy Holly glasses, a carved wooden walking stick, and something that he’d invented that looks kind of like a cross between a lightweight blazer and a dress shirt buttoned up to the collar. He called this new creation “the abacost.”

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

“Abacost” is short for “a bas le costume,” which literally means “down with the suit.” And it was Mobutu’s personal response to the European suit and tie. Well, it was his personal response that he more or less copied directly from China.

DIDIER MUMENGI:

It had what was then called a “Mao collar.” But to make it a bit different, the collar was slightly elongated with the scarf in the place of a tie. And voila–the abacost.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

As part of authenticité, Mobutu had come up with a new national dress code. And he made the abacost, the official office uniform in Zaire. And then to round off his down with the suit messaging, he actually made it against the law for men to wear Western suits and ties. But bans are made to be broken, and the dictator’s anti-suit laws certainly didn’t stop the sapeurs from continuing to flaunt their fanciest clothes. And suddenly, dressing like a European dandy took on a whole new political connotation. Now, La Sape was an act of rebellion against the eccentric dictator.

DIDIER MUMENGI:

La Sape was a joy–and that alone was a revolt against Mobutu. It was a statement because it said, “You have forbidden us to live our lives like we want. You have forbidden us to speak as we want. But there’s a space that a dictator like you cannot control, and that is our bodies.”

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

The sapeur’s flashy, uber expensive style was an act of resistance in another way, too, because–here’s the thing–by the 1980s, Mobutu’s Zaire was melting down. As part of authenticité, he seized foreign owned businesses and mostly let them rot. Commodities tanked, and the country was plunged into debt. Oh, and Mobutu was stealing crazy amounts of money–something like half the national budget each year. The dictator himself talked about how broke his country was.

MOBUTU SESE SEKO:

Many doctors are examining a financially sick Zaire. Some want shock treatment. Others want radical surgery.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

As Zaire’s economy crumbled, so did its infrastructure. And in the midst of those dark days, sapeurs could be seen strutting down Kinshasa streets littered with potholes and gurgling with raw sewage in their designer trench coats and thousand-dollar crocodile loafers.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

The sapeurs weren’t just pushing back against Mobutu’s dress code. They seemed to be an open rebellion against their country’s bleak reality. There was so little money to be had, and here they were choosing to blow it on, like, pocket watches and fedoras, as if to say, “We refuse to let these difficult circumstances ruin our ambiance or scuff our fine leather boots.”

SHANTRELLE LEWIS:

In the larger grand scheme of the social realities of what’s happening in the Congo, it’s frivolous, right? This is a frivolous activity.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

This is author Shantrelle Lewis again.

SHANTRELLE LEWIS:

But for me, anytime someone can use resources to create the type of reality that they want to live–and even if that is to imagine this luxury lifestyle–I believe that’s an act of power and agency and resistance.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

Eventually Zaire’s economic situation forced many to leave the country. That migration accelerated in the mid1990s after Mobutu was deposed by a rebel army and then a brutal civil war erupted. As hundreds of thousands of Zairian migrants fanned out across the world, they took the culture of La Sape with them, especially to Europe, where sapeurs now had regular access to brands and styles that had been hard to come by at home. The tradition of sapeur fashion duels found new life in the nightclubs of Paris and Brussels.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

European filmmakers began capturing sapeur culture for a global audience. In a 2004 documentary, a group of sapeurs are seen standing in a plaza in Belgium, boasting about the brands they’re wearing: Comme des Garçons, Versace, and Yohji Yamamoto. One of the sapeurs points at the camera and declares in Lingala, “This is the story of wicked fashion.”

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

By the early 2000s, sapeurs were getting attention around the world. At the same time, journalists and photographers started traveling to Africa to report on sapeur culture in Kinshasa and Brazzaville.

SHANTRELLE LEWIS:

That’s one of the phenomena that made the sapeur culture so prominent was that it occurred during a time when social media began to be on a rise. So now the sapeur were the subjects of everyday photographers, which then opened up their world to all of us.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

Last year, Congo hosted the Francophone Games–a kind of Olympics for the French speaking world. The opening ceremony in Kinshasa was a medley of traditional Congolese dance, song, and puppetry.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

And then in the middle of the show, the stadium suddenly went completely black. A row of yellow taxis appeared out of the darkness, headlights blazing. Then the car doors flung open. A bunch of people in pinstripe suits and foot-tall top hats and iridescent gold blazers started pouring out.

RYAN LENORA BROWN:

Seeing the sapeurs on such a big stage, it was clear to me that they had gone mainstream in the best possible way. This bold, extravagant cult of luxury fashion used to be counterculture. But when I was in Kinshasa, many Congolese told me that now, “La Sape, c’est notre patrimoine national.” “La Sape is our national heritage.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON:

99% Invisible was reported this week by Ryan Lenora Brown, and produced and edited by me, Christopher Johnson. Mix and sound design by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and Kayko Donald. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Special thanks this week to – Kristen Laciste, Yves Sambu, Leon Tsambu, Kadhitoza, and our fixer in Kinshasa, Tsopher Kabambi. Also thanks to Nkumu Katalay and Maliyamungu Muhande for the voice overs, and the Mfoumbila Kongo Dance Company. Roman Mars is our supreme magistrate and ambiance maker. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of our incredible team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Sarah Baik, and Neena Pathak. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family, and THIS episode was produced in our studios and offices in beautiful… chaotic… midtown, Manhattan. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There’s a link to that, and you can go off listening to every single solitary past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.