In Brazzaville, they appear like apparitions. A plume of dust lifts as they walk—one in a double-breasted canary-yellow suit, another in crimson patent-leather shoes so bright they catch the sun like mirrors. Neckerchiefs whisper softly at their throats. They do not rush. They glide—deliberately, impossibly, like men with nowhere else to be and everything to prove. Children trail behind. Vendors pause mid-transaction. A boulevard transforms into a proscenium. This is not performance. This is La Sape.

La Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes (La Sape). The Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People. A name that might sound like a punchline—until you see the reverence with which these men treat their own presence. In a city where water runs intermittently and power outages punctuate the days, elegance has become a form of infrastructure. They dress, steadfastly, as though tomorrow is inevitable.

La Sape emerged in 1920s Brazzaville, capital of what is now the Republic of the Congo, rooted equally in satire and subversion. Congolese men, domestic workers to French colonizers, mimicked the tailored attire of their employers—not in tribute but in irony. Clothing became costumes of satire, reflecting and inverting colonial hierarchies. By the 1940s, Congolese intellectuals—the évolués—embraced sapeur fashion, embedding it within their anticolonial critiques. By the 1960s, as independence arrived and regional economies wavered, Congolese migrants faced exclusion in Paris and London. La Sape provided refuge and identity, paralleling Harlem Renaissance dandyism, and blossoming further under Mobutu Sese Seko’s restrictive sartorial edicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

And yet—when this year’s Met Gala turned its gaze toward Black dandyism, these men were curiously absent. There were tributes to zoot suits and Harlem Renaissance rebels. There were nods to Baldwin, André Leon Talley, and Dapper Dan—but La Sape, in all of its bold color, remained curiously absent. Why does this vivid African expression of dandyism remain banished from memory? What does it mean to canonize Black elegance in New York yet forget those who built runways from rubble?

The spring 2025 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” offers a fitting backdrop to revisit La Sape’s legacy. The creative vision draws from scholar Monica L. Miller’s pivotal text Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, in which Miller describes Black dandyism as “a strategy and a tool to rethink identity, to reimagine the self in a different context—to really push a boundary on who and what counts as human.” Tyler Mitchell’s catalog editorial, honey-lit and sepia-soaked, previewed a celebration that felt both reverent and futuristic. Fashion critics already hail it as historic. Yet, within these powerful early glimpses, La Sape—a movement embodying dandyism not merely as homage but as defiance—felt noticeably absent. This omission does more than leave out a vibrant thread of style; it subtly reshapes our understanding of Black dandyism by narrowing it to Western and diasporic expressions. Without La Sape, we risk reinforcing a hierarchy of aesthetic legitimacy that sidelines African origins and innovations in favor of what is more legible to Western institutions.

As actress Ayo Edebiri remarked in Vogue and GQ’s collaboration editorial, “There’s nothing more dandy than an African man dressed to the nines, really showing out, going to a party or a wedding.” Her look, while not a direct reference to La Sape, paid homage to her Nigerian heritage through coral beads honoring the Edo tribe. Elsewhere, singer Tems wore an Ankara gown and Afrobeats icon Burna Boy donned an oxblood suit and cape—both designed by British Ghanaian designer Ozwald Boateng. Notably, Savannah James wore a custom pinstripe gown by Congolese designer Anifa Mvuemba of Hanifa, who has long used her platform to spotlight Congolese artistry and conflict—a take on the Harlem zoot suit, reimagined with a mermaid silhouette and midriff cutout. While these gestures nodded to African sartorial traditions, there was no flicker of Brazzaville, no echo of Kinshasa, and minimal mention of the sapeur, who has dressed like a sovereign for decades in a system that offered him no kingdom.

There is power in what we saw—refusals coded in velvet, declarations hidden in the drape of a sleeve. Jeremy O. Harris’s sharply tailored navy Balmain look, for instance, summoned the spirits of Frederick Douglass and Beau Brummell, merging political dignity with dandy lineage. But the power on display still passed through institutional filters: curated, citational, palatable. The dandyism we were shown leaned heavily on the diasporic afterlives of the West. It canonized what could be archived, and overlooked what has always lived outside the museum—on street corners, in the hunger of self-invention. That’s where La Sape lives.

It is that very oppositional lens that structures the sartorial ontology of a sapeur. The Congo crisis, which emerged from decolonial efforts and Mobutu Sese Seko’s “authenticité” campaign in reaction to that process, would only deepen La Sape’s radical edge. Mobutu banned Western dress and championed a state-sanctioned aesthetic meant to symbolize national pride. But sapeurs refused to trade their elegance for ideology. They donned their banned suits not in hidden corners, but defiantly, turning the street into a kind of catwalk of refusal. As historian Didier Gondola and others have written, the elegance of the sapeur was never simply about imitation; it was a strategic act of reappropriation. The clothing became a medium for contesting visibility and authority, a stage on which colonial hierarchy was undone thread by thread. Photographers like Tariq Zaidi and Aude Osnowycz distilled this defiance into image. Zaidi’s series Sapeurs: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congo shows men emerging from daily labor not exhausted but resplendent. Osnowycz labels them “dandy activists,” dressing sharply despite societal disregard, their style both spectacle and structure. These visuals don’t just illustrate—they reinforce the core argument: La Sape is less about emulating power than performing a refusal so vivid it cannot be ignored.

La Sape, as scholar Dominic Thomas argues, cannot be fully understood outside the dynamic loop between Brazzaville, Kinshasa, and Paris. It is not only a local style but a transnational ritual, one that turns the journey—especially the symbolic return from France—into an act of sartorial initiation. The sapeur becomes a traveler and a translator, bridging two worlds not just with fabric but with flair. As Thomas notes, the act of dressing well in postcolonial spaces becomes symbolic warfare—a stylized duel between imposed identities and chosen ones, between being seen and being dismissed. In this context, mimicry becomes menace: The sapeur is not copying Europe—he is outdressing it, haunting its imperial legacy with every creased pant leg and silk pocket square. Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou describes the sapeur as someone determined to be unforgettable—composed in contradiction, a living poem assembled in silk, an elegance that disarms as it dazzles.

Today, African and diasporic designers are no longer on the fringes of fashion—they are shaping its very form. From Grace Wales Bonner’s cerebral tailoring (which was on peak display throughout the evening) to Kenneth Ize’s handwoven futurism, from Thebe Magugu’s archival storytelling to Imane Ayissi’s couture interventions—African fashion is not responding to global trends; it is setting them. A true celebration of La Sape would acknowledge this shift—but the archive has its biases, as do its curators.

Traditionally homosocial, La Sape’s gendered silhouette is now evolving. Women sapeuses and queer communities are now remaking the movement from within, not asking for entry, but redesigning the architecture. Brazzaville’s sapeuses, like Jocelyne Loubayi, Grace Bula, and Nathalie Biteni, queer the tradition—insisting elegance is genderless. Vice’s profile underscores their command: “We are not copying men; we are reminding them elegance has no gender.” These sapeuses mirror the legacy of Gladys Bentley, the Harlem blues singer who, in the 1920s, wore white tuxedos and top hats while pounding piano keys in speakeasies. Teyana Taylor also embodies this legacy today, as a master of gender play who juxtaposes the softness of feminine beauty with garments structured in the tradition of masculine tailoring.

Monica Miller’s work, too often flattened into a Harlem-centered study, underscores dandyism as global diasporic self-definition: Baldwin’s Parisian trench coat meets Accra’s kente-wrapped sneakers. Harlem and Africa have long been in conversation, each a regional wellspring of culture, resources, and style. That dialogue continues today—“Little Senegal” is woven into Harlem’s fabric just as surely as the tailors that give the neighborhood its signature flair.

Harlem style exemplifies this intersection of innovation and reconstruction, a world where you declare with each step that beauty, too, is sovereignty. Dapper Dan’s genius, for instance, lies not merely in wearing designer clothing but in tearing it apart and reassembling it into something unmistakably his own—a practice that forced major fashion houses to reckon with him. This ethos mirrors La Sape’s rejection of conformity and embrace of reinvention. Both use fashion as a radical language of transformation, defying exclusion not by assimilation but by aesthetic audacity.

Nearby the Met, Harlem sidewalks burst with Senegalese boubous and Nigerian gele crowns—visual sovereignty that museums can’t contain. Movements like #BlackOutEid have turned these celebrations into aesthetic declarations—asserting that to be Black, Muslim, and immaculately adorned is a refusal in itself. Dapper Dan may be Harlem royalty, but so is someone’s uncle from Dakar in cobalt silk. Just across the East River from the Met—where the tailoring of Blackness was on full curatorial display—Black and African migrants line up outside overcrowded shelters, the target of caustic rhetoric and policy failure. These textures of dissonant spectacle exist side by side; the city’s capability to exalt Black elegance in one zip code while surveilling Black arrival in another is not a contradiction, but a structure.

The contrast deepens when you follow the money. This year’s Met Gala raised a record-breaking $31 million—while there are reports that the museum itself supposedly receives $30 million in annual public funding from New York City. With a $6 billion endowment, the Met is not a scrappy arts organization—it’s an empire of cultural capital. And yet, that wealth is rarely channeled toward nurturing the next André Leon Talley, Dapper Dan, or James Baldwin. It stages Black style but does not always invest in the ecosystems that sustain it, leaving its creative embers to languish in the hopes of being celebrated in its sartorial afterlife.

This notion of correction—of repositioning the archive—is where a surprising resonance begins to emerge. Ballroom culture, born in the 1980s from the Black and Latinx queer and trans communities of Harlem and the Bronx, may seem distant from La Sape, but its logic is familiar. In abandoned halls and rented clubs, ballroom participants walked categories like Butch Queen Realness and Femme Queen Performance—not as pageantry, but as protest. They built houses, invented kinship, and styled themselves into existence. Watching the mainstream evolution of ballroom culture—the language, the movement, the visual vernacular—has made it newly legible as an echo to La Sape, both serving as mediums that subvert institutional beauty politics to their sartorial whims. Where the sapeur parades on the boulevard, the ballroom child walks the broken floor with equal poise. Both aesthetic forms insist on visibility. Both respond to social erasure by composing their own mythologies. La Sape is a protest in silk. Ballroom is a prayer stitched in sequins and sweat. They are not the same—but when the noise fades, the rhythm underneath is uncannily familiar. Neither, coincidentally enough, got their just due on the Met Gala floor, despite being prime fodder for the Afrofuturistic fantasies that tailoring can offer.

Zora Neale Hurston provides a framework for understanding this urgency. In her seminal 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” which inspired the critical framework behind “Superfine,” she writes: “The will to adorn is the second most notable characteristic in Negro expression.” For Hurston, adornment was never superficial—it was foundational, signaling dignity, creativity, and self-respect. It manifested in language, gestures, and embellishments above all, as a refusal to remain invisible. La Sape doesn’t merely echo this idea; it elevates adornment into philosophy itself.

Guillaume Diop’s collaboration with Valentino and Gabonese stylist Kevin Lanoy perhaps offered the most compelling vision of a distinctly African interpretation of dandyism at the Met. The Senegalese model and ballet dancer—celebrated as the first Black principal dancer at the Paris Opera—wore a lush emerald silk boubou beneath a heavy, textured coat and flowing white trousers. The ensemble beautifully wove together the elegance of the Harlem Renaissance, the deconstructed ethos of Dapper Dan, the vibrant confidence of the sapeur, and an undeniably regal futurism, emphasizing how these diverse sartorial expressions are, at their core, part of the same ongoing conversation.

La Sape isn’t merely commerce but choreography, lineage and defiance stitched into form. It is not merely what we wear, but how we carry what history denied us. In Francophone Africa, La Sape has become more than an aesthetic. It is a visual code, a sartorial shorthand—a grammar of recognition and resistance through which elegance is articulated, debated, and made iconic. The rustle, the plume, the deep and low senteur—the atmospheric memory that follows a body committed to not disappearing.

More than aesthetic, La Sape is epistemological—it produces knowledge through gesture, silhouette, and subversion, small acts that challenge the archive itself. They say: We exist. We insist. And we arrive dressed for tomorrow—pushing, as Monica Miller reminds us, against the boundaries of who and what counts as human. La Sape resists museumification precisely because it lives to deconstruct and rebuild, thriving where curatorial logic falters; it is Hurston’s theory, sung into a new century.

For the sapeurs, the sapeuses, the ballroom children, the dandy prophets, and the musicians—those who stitched their power into seams and choruses long before institutions took note—the world is a mirror. But they no longer wait for its reflection. They are dancing past it. Striding through it. Sovereign in silk. And as the Met seeks to stage the future of Black style, it would do well to remember: Some have been dressing for that future all along.