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CC 2 (2) pp. 209–223 Intellect Limited 2015

Clothing Cultures Volume 2 Number 2

© 2015 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/cc.2.2.209_1

Keywords

dandyAfrican dressswenkasretrospective fashionsapeursblack dappers

enrica PicarelliUniversity of Lisbon

elegance and retrospective

sartorialism among young

african males

abstract

This article offers a set of preliminary and necessarily incomplete notes on the subcul-ture of African dandies, who re-appropriate the styling trends of past generations of Afro-diasporic gentlemen to new aims. While dandyism has a long and respected tradition across many African states, it remains an under-investigated phenomenon, save for the bibliography of Congolese sapologie. Furthermore, this topic has found little to no space in the literature on black self-styling, in monographic studies on Afro-diasporic dandyism, and in the journalistic and artistic production on the ‘New Age’ ‘dappers’. I engage with this lack of scholarship and with the challenge of look-ing for the elements and stories that make African dandyism, indeed, African, rather than generally ‘black’, paying attention to the ways in which this aesthetic vocation weaves together a concern with memory and cultural pride, with professional ambi-tions and self-promotion.

Thanks to the relatively recent spread of communication technologies on the continent, sartorial fashions produced in Africa are boosting their outreach and imposing themselves at the vanguard of both the mainstream and subcultural scenes. Local designer labels are rising on the western market thanks, in part, to the promotion of celebrities like Michelle Obama, Lupita Nyong’o and Nicki Minaj (NBC News 2015; Gundan 2015), while street-style blogs based in the

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1. In spite of his predominantly masculine nature, a subculture of female dandyism has also thrived (see Yazan 2012).

2. A man of modest means like George ‘Beau’ Brummel mobilized sartorial authority to rise above his standards in London’s Regency era; Lord Byron used it to promote his utopian ideals; Charles Baudelaire conveyed his condemnation of bourgeois conformism through a dark minimalism, while in the twentieth century the sartorial performances of Quentin Crisp alerted society against homophobia.

metropolitan hubs of the continent inspire a transnational collectivity of young fashionables (Jennings 2012; Chiénin 2015). These two aspects, the successful entrepreneurship of African designers and the fresh style of young urbanites, make Afro-sartorialism a prominent actor of contemporary dress practices, one that begs extended investigation, as its successful circulation propels the development of a more positive definition of ‘Africanness’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Wawrzinek and Makokha 2011; Farber 2010). In particular, the currency of the ‘Afropolitan’ (Mbembe 2007), ‘Afro-chic’ (Kauppinen and Spronk 2014), and ‘Afro-cool’ (de Witte 2014) neologisms in scholarly studies and pop-cultural narratives suggests that statements of Africanness are, today, conspicuously based in an affirmative spirit of cosmopolitan taste choices and a ‘cool’ lifestyle. Through creative dress and beauty choices, the racial pride and a re-attachment to Africa of urban young adults and media-savvy millennials take the form of an eminently aesthetic and aestheticizing endeavour.

This article offers a set of preliminary and necessarily incomplete notes on the subculture of African dandies, who re-appropriate the styling trends of past generations of Afro-diasporic gentlemen to new aims. While dandyism has a long and respected tradition across many African states, it remains an under-investigated phenomenon, save for analyses of the Congolese sapologie (Gandoulou 1989; Bazenguisa 1992; Bazenguissa and MacGaffey 1995, 2000; Thomas 2003; Gondola 1999). Furthermore, it has found little space in the literature on black self-styling (White and White 1999; Tulloch 2010, 2014), in monographic studies on Afro-diasporic dandyism (Miller 2009), and in the journalistic and artistic production on the ‘New Age’ ‘dappers’ (Caramanica 2011; Lewis 2014; Gebreyes 2015). I engage with this lack of scholarship and with the challenge of looking for the elements and stories that make African dandyism, indeed, African, rather than generally ‘black’, paying attention to the ways in which this aesthetic vocation weaves together a concern with memory and cultural pride, with professional ambitions and self-promotion.

the ‘crudest sort of dandies’: dressing to live and living to dress in the (Post)colony

Dandyism is commonly regarded as a frivolous self-spectacularization of the body: ‘a dictatorship in the matter of clothes and exterior elegance’ (D’Aurevilly 1988: 31) pursued by way of masculine refinement and a haughty demeanour.1 In Sartor Resartus Thomas Carlyle asserts that the dandy ‘is heroically conse-crated to […] the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that the others dress to live, he lives to dress’ (2014). Sartorial wit is the designated vehicle of this philosophy of style: ‘[t]he precise cut of a coat, the colour and fold of a pocket square, the tilt of a hat’ (d’Hamilton n.d.) show that a dandy places as much emphasis on craftsmanship, as he does on beauty and sobriety. But there is more to this phenomenon than gratuitous over-aestheticizing. Dandyism is a practice of self-representation that employs sartorial extravagance to appraise society’s normative and normalizing mechanisms and critique their restrictions. Since its alleged birth in Regency Britain, the aesthetic sensibility of dappers, as dandies are sometimes called, has given form to a ‘style of critique’ (Miller 2009: 179) that channels dissatisfaction, even impatience, with sociocultural conventions, at the same time professing a condescending cult of individuality.2

This is especially true of black dandies, whose vocation of living to dress has often given in to a practice of dressing up to survive racial prejudice. Historically, the hypervisible bodies of black dandies, in their varying degrees

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3. TheAsmarinosareacommunityofmostlyoldmenfromAsmara,whodressupinItalianfashion.Thestyleisreminiscentof1930scolonialcostume,whichcomplementedthesuitandhatcombinationwithawalkingstick.Littletonobibliographicinformationisavailableonthissubculture.

4. Intheindependenceyears,apoliticsofcostumewasmobilizedtoexpresssupportofthenationalismandracialentitlement.Althoughinmostcases,thecitizensofwhatoncehadbeenEuropeancolonieswerediscouragedfromwearingwesternfashion,LeslieRabineobservesthatLeopoldSenghor,thefirstpresidentofindependentSenegal,‘alwaysworeaprimandproperWesternsuit’inaperformativeeffortoffashioninganimageofthe‘newpoliticalself-identities’oftheex-Frenchcolony(2013:174),albeitbyrejectingtheNégritudeprincipleofassimilationistrejection.

5. DonationsandexchangesofclothesbetweenEuropeanofficialsandmissionariesandAfricanchiefsspearheadedthecolonizingmission.Theformerswouldoffer‘oldclothes,especiallywithbrightcolors,[military]garmentswithstripes,hats,helmets,longcavalrysabers’asgiftstocajolelocalchiefsandsecuretheirloyalty(SarvognandeBrazzaquotedinGondola2010:158).

of eccentricity and sobriety, have been an arena of fierce self-affirmative strug-gle. As a product of colonialism, Afro-diasporic dandyism complements and complicates his white referent and the system of signification that associates a dark pigmentation with dirt, uncouthness, and slovenliness. Through a crea-tive appropriation of high-brow sartorialism, black dandyism seeks to provoke a ‘paradigm shift’ and turn racial objectification on its head (Lewis 2014). ‘[B]lack dandies continually rewrite the story of their own actual and represen-tational subjugation by reanimating the tools of their oppression, tailoring their supposed uniforms for other tasks’ (Miller 2009: 200). Until today, ‘stylin’ out’, a practice of ‘showing […] sartorial stuff’ (Miller 2009: 1) on public occasions like going to church and attending social events, has worked, both outside and within the black community, to send signals ‘about how each dresser sees himself and how he wants to be seen by others’ (Miller 2009: 2). In Africa, in particular, care for the body, sartorial wit and cleanness have served as visible signs of self-determination, expressing an awareness of the politics of repre-sentation responsible for reproducing racial inequalities. The manifestations of dandyism based in the continent, which include very different sartorial aesthetics, from the turn-of-the-century style of the Ethiopian Asmarinos3 and South African swenkas, to the post-industrial look of the youths of Kinshasa, evidence a desire for recognition and a rejection of the pressures of conform-ity and control endured by black subjects through centuries of military and financial colonialism.4

When in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Central African serv-ants and labourers took to the streets of colonial towns in extravagant attires of velvet hats, waist-cloths, army coats, leggings and no shoes, the French judged these forms of careful self-stylization as a ridiculous affectation of foreign manners (Martin 1995: 154).5 Labelling these fashionables ‘the crudest sort of dandies’, a priest who visited Brazzaville at the time noted with disdain that they wore ‘real trousers, jackets, soft-brimmed hats, carried canes and had a cigarette hanging from their lips’, with the most ‘resourceful’ ones sporting ‘down-at-the-heel shoes’ (Martin 1995: 158). Winston Churchill was equally upset at the passion that Kenyan chiefs showed for European garments, includ-ing ‘cast-off’ and ‘tattered’ ones and ruled that they wear ‘ceremonial robes’ to more easily mark them as imperial subjects (Hay 2004: 68). For centuries, European garments had been available in local markets and, by the end of the nineteenth century, they animated an informal network of exchanges between masters and slaves. The latter competed for status and entitlement crafting unconventional ensembles. A strong value was attached to even the simplest garment, since each defined a concrete style with connotations of affluence, deference and modernity. Furthermore, primness, cleanliness and sartorial taste bore the promise of a more desirable lifestyle. In particular, cleanliness, a property referencing both bodily hygiene and the status of neatly arranged clothing items, was an important signifier of status. In some circumstances, for example, a starched shirt and pressed shorts would facilitate employment, helping men to earn a living in the urban centres that were replacing tribal communities as arenas of socialization and identity formation. For young Kenyans, these simple garments were a means to adapt to new dynamics of power, as authority shifted to the white military from the hands of community elders, who continued to adopt and demand respect of traditional attire from the youths. At the same time, the self-fashioning brought along the embracing of the modern values of lifestyle individualism, self-reliance, and an accumu-lation of material goods.

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6. Phyllis Martin notes that in Central Africa the consumption of foreign fashion drove urban socialization and influenced status. It built on pre-colonial practices of displaying dress to wield power, express well-being and identity.

In the 1920s, men from Gabon and Loango continued to be fashion leaders. This seems to have been inspired not only by status but also by a deep appreciation of clothes. They socialized in clubs that were oriented to their interest in dress. They wore suits sometimes with waistcoats, and used accessories such as canes, monocles, gloves and pocket-watches on chains. Evening and Sunday parties consisted of drinking aperitifs and listening and dancing to European and Latin American music on the gramophone. Polished leather shoes were too expensive for most men, but canvas shoes were increasingly worn. Shirts with detachable collars were fashionable among older men, but young people who wore them were considered dressing beyond their station.

(1995: 158)

7. Sape is the acronym of La Societé des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes. Non-coincidentally the term refers to the slang French verb saper, meaning ‘to dress elegantly’. I use the terms sapologie and sape interchangeably throughout the article.

The ‘ethic of taste and restraint’ (d’Hamilton n.d.) that grew out of the trau-matic circumstances connected with colonialism, added new meaning to local, pre-existing dress practices (Allman 2004). The necessity to adapt to revolu-tionary changes while preserving dignity in a contest of limited opportunities made African dandyism a medium of aesthetic negotiation, which expresses a vision of modernity informed by unequal relations of power and access to consumer goods (Hansen 2000).6 In Central Africa and France, where most dandies now live, the Congolese Sape subculture is a social institution and a fitting example of the ways high-brow sartorialism articulates the ‘cultural shock’ of imperialism and of subsequent ‘socio-economic, sociopolitical and sociocultural crises’ (Bazenguissa 1992: 151, my translation). Since at least the 1930s, it members, called sapeurs,7 have professed a cult of European haute couture based in strict aesthetic codes of tonal harmony, audacity, demure comportment and gait.8 The ‘jazz age refinement’ (Doig 2014) that marks their garish style places the outmost importance on ornamenting, cleanliness and is intrinsically performative: the outfits must cause a perceptual shock and make the sapeurs ‘stick out’ from the crowd (Gondola 2010: 172). The ostentation of labelled clothes (griffes) secures their authority and social prestige. As both a material sign and an abstract referent of value, the griffe makes it possible to enact a form of positive self-portraiture by which anonymous individuals are reborn into persons of standing. So, while Roland Barthes (2013) observes that the material value of an object of clothing is of secondary importance to the European dandy compared to its uniqueness, sapologie is entirely reliant upon it: the griffe’s economic value and the ability to choose and acquire the right garment determine the worth of the men.

Sapeurs believe in griffes and in their power to make a difference. Linen (lino de pepito), worn pompously, is Italian griffe: Georgio Armani [sic], Nino Cerruti and others; the classic suit is signed Marcel Lassance, Yves Saint Laurent, or Arthur and Fox; the shoes are preferably English: Church, Lobb, Alden, and Weston; the leather is Japanese: Kenzo, Yohji Yamamoto; the jeans are by Marithé and François Girbaud. Thierry Mugler is extravagance, and Jean-Paul Gaulthier [sic] is provocation. Without the griffe, the sape would not exist.

(Gondola 1999: 34)

The sartorial performance of parading the griffes expresses a deeply individu-alistic effort, which is not predicated on a passion of beauty for beauty’s sake, as common conceptions of dandyism would suggest. Rather, the appropriation of expensive items of clothing is also an appropriation of the system of signi-fication that is attached to them, particularly as signifiers of status and self-worth. Interpreting the dandyism of the sapeurs as a struggle for respectability, Didier Gondola comments on the importance that a clean and prim appear-ance has, in dispelling the ‘mal ville’, the biased perception of African mascu-linity, both at home and abroad. Elegance ‘uproots the body from the “mal ville,” rehabilitates it, and subjects it to a kind of therapy intended to erase the trauma caused by the myth of the “cursed race”’ (Gondola 1999: 31). Popular among disenfranchised and unemployed men, sapologie practices elegance as an intrinsically aspirational endeavour. It seeks differentiation to gain mutual recognition, crafting the aspirations and dreams of anonymous individuals into an alternative system of visibility that establishes communities of taste, where a shared passion for beauty encourages forms of mentoring and mutual

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8. Sapologie has different incarnations that, in Kinshasa, can take on decidedly darker and cyberpunk tones. Its origins are disputed and its history is intertwined with the political vicissitudes of the former French colony. While Didier Gondola (2010) maintains that the subculture emerged in the 1920s, tracing it to the fashionables of Brazzaville, Rémy Bazenguisa dates its origins to the 1970s and places them in the Democractic Republic of the Congo. There, the local youth embraced a sartorial aesthetic of luxury clothes inspired to Euro-American 1920s fashion to oppose Mobutu’s politics of zaïrification, which culminated in the adoption of the abacost as national costume, consisting of a long-sleeved jacked to wear buttoned up and without a shirt. ‘With the crystallization of affluent dress practices in Bongo, the body of power is no longer in Congo, but moves away from the country’ (1992: 155, my translation). Finally, Martin’s diachronic analysis of dress practices in the colonial Congo evidences the existence of ‘proto-sapeurs club’ in the 1950s (1995: 171).

9. Sapeurs also perform for a public with the aim of electing a grand sapeur.

10. The garments are haute couture, often bought second-hand or on layaway, as most of the men cannot pay for them.

11. In 2004, the Danish director Jeppe Rønde released a documentary entitled The Swenkas (2004). In the intervening years other materials appeared, including

assistance. Ultimately, in a context of indigence and alienation, this aesthetic is an act of self-making that ‘converts absence into presence’ (Miller 2009: 10). Breeding abundance from indigence and notoriety from alienation, sapologie unveils the fiction of social harmony predicated on racial inequality, alerting the eye to the double meanings attached to the ideas of entitlement, self- respect, and dignity in a context charged with unsolved sociocultural tensions.

networKs of memory

Historically, African dandyism has embodied a desire to shift entrenched struc-tures of feeling, particularly the self-perception of African men as worthless beings. Fighting the imposition of standardized clothing both by the colonial powers and, later, the newly independent authorities advocating the nation-alization of dress, black dandies like the sapeurs refuse to abide to the pres-sure of conformity. ‘The adoption of alternative aesthetic codes presents itself as a symbolic gesture aimed at reclaiming power’ (Thomas 2003: 954). By doing so, their dress choices account for quotidian acts of counter-hegemonic resistance.

In the apartheid decades, swenking, a vestimentary performance born in the rural areas of South Africa, was essential to the preservation of Zulu culture and pride. Like the sapeurs, the swenkas favoured a formal dress code inspired by jazz-age refinement. Their tailored suits came with brimmed hats and leather shoes, as well as a variety of accessories, including eyewear, gloves, braces and straw hats, and were displayed at fashion pageants that gathered fellow dandies and citizens as judges of style. On those occasions, the swen-kas would display their ensembles through elaborate acts and special ‘moves’ aimed at calling attention to outfit details.9 The winner would receive money or, more rarely, a goat. The fine clothes invited deference and showed affluence. Yet, more importantly, they signalled a new knowledge of the self, born from the marginalization and racism the men, as migrant workers, experienced in the metropolis. With cleanness and elegance, the swenkas made a social state-ment that did more than create an aesthetic pleasure: it opposed the dehu-manizing effects of Afrikaner rule by educating the community on the values of integrity and gentility, while bringing people together in playful ways. To this day, swenking is considered a model of emancipation and ethnic pride. The swenkas of the 1950s and 1960s set an example for aspiring dandies, who keep alive this sartorial tradition in the twenty-first century. After a period of near-disappearance, swenking has returned to inspire a performative aesthetic of formal, metropolitan menswear. In an article appeared in Vice, new affiliates are photographed in their favourite outfits of Pierre Cardin suits and ties, Baker and Florsheim shoes, Cashini shirts (Fleminger 2007).10 Complementing their urban presence is a wave of artistic and commercial productions, including photographic exhibitions, a documentary, and an advertisement by Nokia that feed a collective rediscovery of the phenomenon, while making it a global real-ity.11 Not without ambiguities, – the swenkas ‘openly long for the days of apart-heid’ (Rønde 2004) – an intergenerational discourse is taking shape around the emancipatory role of their dandy aesthetics. Remembering his grandfather, a dapper from Durban named Fred, Earle Sebastian, a self-defined dandy and one of the artists responsible for the exhibition ‘Raw’ that explores swenking as a deeply affective subculture, recalls the man’s philosophy of dress. His sense of style helped Fred to rise above his modest circumstances, turning him into a role model for the family members. Sebastian explains that his knowledge

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a Nokia commercial (Nomakhomazi 2009), the multimedia exhibition ‘Raw’ by Earle Sebastian, Hassan Hajjaj and Chris Saunders (Picture Farm 2104), and a photographic reportage by Christian Courrèges (2013).

12. In Africa, heritage discourse, as ‘the framing of cultural pasts’ (de Witte and Meyers 2013: 43), is being reconceptualized as an aesthetic endeavour that defines national identity and Africanness according to stylistic parameters like ‘sensational and emotional involvement’ and ‘colourful visualization’ (de Witte and Meyers 2013: 45, 54).

13. A sartorial imaginary inspired by African dress practices and street-style fashion is gaining increased prominence on both western streets and catwalks, with the trend inciting accusations of cultural appropriation (Suleyman 2014; Makhoka 2015).

of the latest fashion trends and ability to combine clothes in graceful outfits amounted to a cultural capital and a means of social advancement. Today, the testimonies collected by artists, journalists, and common people shed new light on swenking, addressing it not as an archival discovery, but as a living model of effective self-realization. Listing the three rules of style passed to him by his grandfather, Sebastian passes on to young South Africans and an international public the educational value intrinsic to personal refinement:

[Fred] could talk to you about a tie knot, depending on the shape of the collar of a shirt. He could talk to you about which buttons you do up on a blazer. You never do them all the way up. [The rules were:] never be the first at a dance, always make sure you have a clean white hand-kerchief in your back pocket, and always make sure you have the best shoes on.

(Abelis 2014)

This form of heritage discourse intersects with the aesthetic sensibilities of a new generation of African creatives.12 A quick look at the most trending street-style blogs from the continent uncovers a transnational community of millennials and young adults with a preference for styles recalling the Harlem Renaissance and the revivals of turn-of-the-century fashion. Never embraced dogmatically or exclusively, these vestimentary forms coexist with many others. However, they indisputably recur on the sartorial horizon of Africa, appearing as a predominant model of self-representation for young males. Papa Petit, a member of the designer couple 2ManySiblings, maintains that his style is modelled on ‘the dapper 1920s men’s style sensibilities’ and the costumes in The Great Gatsby (Okayafrica n.d.). This style combines contemporary and vintage elements, particularly slim suits, tweed jackets, tailored slacks and starched shirts, with altered, or modernized garments, most of which come in local textile styles (2ManySiblings). Like the other members of this New Wave of dandyism leaning on African sensibilities, Petit abides to a ‘philosophy of clothes’ (Carlyle 2014) that practices gracefulness, self-control and originality. Respectful of these dandical principles, the fashionables pay special attention to ornamentation. Even when the final sartorial effort strays from expressing a jazz-age aesthetics, the choice of accessories may still index it. Watch fobs, braces, fedoras, bowler hats, trilby hats, flat caps, club, bow or silk ties, pocket squares, rimmed spectacles, leather satchels, duffel bags, conspire to pursue a timeless idea of cosmopolitan elegance, individualism, and refinement. Also described as ‘sophisticated-punk’ (Messy Nessy 2014), this dandy aesthet-ics counters the imaginary of mass-produced ‘tribal’ prints (Felsenthal 2012), beads, and cheap trinkets to which the continent’s vestimentary universe is often reduced, developing a style that self-consciously evokes the sartorialism of Afro-diasporic icons like Marcus Garvey, Miles Davis or Ira Aldrige.13

Indeed, an awareness of the role dress has played in the civil rights struggle is a defining feature of contemporary African dandyism. Attempts at unearth-ing vernacular memories of resistance through fashion are a prominent signi-fier of the retrospective sartorialism of the Smartists, for example, a designer duo from Johannesburg with a vast online following. In a number of posts on their blog ‘Sartist’, the duo wear ensembles inspired by formal menswear from the first decades of the 1900s. The pictures capture them in dark suits, skinny ties, starched shirts, fedoras and leather boots, or in cashmere sweat-ers and roll necks, combined in more casual style of outfits of un-matching

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elements. The images showcase a love of quality tailoring, but also an inten-tion of foregrounding the material value of the garments and the care involved in keeping them in perfect condition. There is a narrative hidden in the look of the perfectly pressed folds of a pair of slacks, in the shine of a shoe, or in the immaculate white and crispness of a shirt. These details weave a story that references the uplifting aesthetic of swenkas’s high-brow fashion and its impor-tance as an informal, mutual-aid institution, breathing new life into memories of a time when a groomed and composed appearance could secure literal and figurative survival. And indeed, the Smartists maintain that their style is ‘not only about the clothes. It’s about Life. Struggle. Expression. Art. History. Love’ (Sartist 2013b). The keywords unlock the overlooked meanings of a fash-ion philosophy steeped in the politics of respectable dress that played such a big part in Afro-diasporic emancipation (Caroll 2005). In a blog post from August 2013, the Smartists express their wish to celebrate ‘Township Elegance’, sharing a black-and-white picture of the members of an anti- apartheid cell meeting in secret in a backyard. In another, entitled ‘Two Generations’ an old portrait of a finely dressed black men is juxtaposed with a shot of one of the stylists to foreground the aesthetic sensibility that binds them (Sartist 2013c). These posts belong to a series of social-media interventions aimed at ‘bring-ing back some History they forgot to tell you in your History class’ (Sartist 2013b). In a similar way, the collaborations between 2ManySiblings and vari-ous African photographers, weave fashion and photography together, often taking inspiration from the ‘old album photos’ of their parents to establish dress as curatorial practice and inter-generational meditation. With refine-ment and elegance, the Smartists and 2ManySiblings craft a performance of the past that indexes the visual language of respectability and proper conduct by which blacks, both in South Africa and the world over, expressed with their well-dressed bodies a specific model of citizenship.

The Smartists’s engagement with black history does not stop at South African events. The duo regularly post blog entries containing archival pictures of ‘politicians that inspire’ (Sartist 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). These have featured Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Patrice Lumumba, Malcom X, whose sartorial distinction is the most iconic and immediately visible signifier of their public role of advocates of equality. In adopting this sartorial aesthetic and acknowl-edging its value for collective self-expression, the Smartists orient their sensi-bility to keeping alive the teachings on racial pride of the leaders of the Black Consciousness movement.

A lot of our style came out of this era, this period in history. The Black Consciousness Era. It came out of that period where the Black man decided to take Black pride back from Colonialism … where the Black man demanded respect, not only from others but himself too. The era where the Black man took pride in his appearance. 400 years of Black Slave Ancestors picking the cotton but not wearing it. How times change.

(Sartist 2013a)

In different but related ways, the swenkas, 2ManySiblings, and the Smartists take issue with the politics of visibility and power of formerly-colonized socie-ties. Their vestimentary choices display on the clothed body hushed memo-ries of quotidian battles for dignity and respectability, making high-brow sartorialism appealing to a global audience. On these finely-costumed bodies

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the latter encounters a mirror that reflects individual and collective notions of dignity, respectability and integration. Most importantly, the costumed body becomes, itself, a site of negotiation of the terms of belonging, acceptance and rejection in and by the social community. The Smartists address this legacy with their formal style. Respectful of the dandical principle of creative experi-mentation, they do not imitate the men in the posters, but adapt their style to new circumstances and aesthetic preferences. A straw hat can occasion-ally supplement the classical fedora, going with a brown suit enlivened by a colourful silk pocket square, or the sleeves of a suit can be altered in either colour, or shape, in conformity with the dandy’s tailoring abilities (Sartist 2012). Similarly, 2ManySiblings mix elements inspired by the old styles of their parents with the ‘vibrant colours, shapes and textures’ of Kenyan Maasai market (Okayafrica n.d.). The outcome of these experiments is retrospective, but also bohemian and playful, an addition that does not compromise the value of the ensemble as a symbol of racial pride and historic awareness, as actually reinforces its educational value. Operating on social media, modern-day dandies fabricate visual networks of meaning that augment the power of style to create transnational communities of kin.

maKing fashion memorable and KeePing memory fashionable through ‘textile flashbacKs’

The jazz-age sensibility of sophisticated punks pays homage to renowned and anonymous advocates of black consciousness, which dressed and acted for respectability. This concern expresses a counter-hegemonic message that converts the retrospective wardrobe of young fashionables into a sensible archive of community and inter-generational memory. In Africa, what Barthes regarded as the dandy’s ‘radical’ enacting of ‘singularity in clothing’ (2013: 63), is a transnational and cross-generational effort at self-realization, predicated on the affirmative power of elegance and craftsmanship. Letting geography and racial pride guide them, modern-day dandies make fashion memorable and keep memory fashionable. The engagement of Earl Sebastian and the Smartists with the traces of township elegance shows the extent to which local and family histories influence lifestyle choices that bear on collective representations of national and racial identity. The awareness of the web of memories, affects, expectations, and forgotten episodes attached to the garments makes up for the prominence that twenty-first century dandies attribute to wearing vintage.

Indeed, to the ideological concern of showcasing a tangible network of everyday affirmative politics, the dandies add a special relationship with second-hand garments that repudiates conspicuous consumption, support-ing a sustainable economics of dress. Their pride in crafting unique ensembles comes, in fact, with the added knowledge that refinement and sophistica-tion are increased by acts of sartorial excavation. The booming community of Namibian gentlemen gathering around the self-styling character of Lourens Gebhardt, a fashion designer who goes by the street name of Loux the Vintage Guru, exemplifies the importance of practicing a material and affective archae-ology of dress. Gebhardt’s cult of elegance revolves around an obsession with vintage apparel that he acquires at street markets located in Namibia and South Africa. Gebhart proudly recounts that he has done away with mass-produced items of clothing in favour of locally-produced, or locally-acquired ones (de Greef 2014). Most of his and his peers’s highest valued posses-sions are, indeed, unique retro findings. To Gebhardt, conscious spending is

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14. On this aspect Miller maintains: ‘Black dandyism has had and will always have a difficult, indeed, a tortured, relationship to consumption in that the procurement of clothing, accessories, and luxury goods that enables the performance comes literally and sometimes metaphorically at a high cost’ (2009: 17).

15. As becomes clear in the following quotation, Gebhardt is here referring to European and Asian-manufactured wax cloth. His slip of the tongue references the common knowledge, widespread in Africa, that such textiles, imposed by imperial commercial policy at the turn of the nineteenth century, are, indeed, part of the vestimentary aesthetic of the continent (see Sylvanus 2013; Nielsen 1979).

what makes contemporary African dandyism an essentially democratic and accessible subculture. Africa’s flourishing economy of second-hand cloth-ing (Hansen 2010) allows everybody to ‘[d]ress cheap and look like a million bucks’ (Afful 2014).14 This regenerative attitude of bringing discarded garments back to life is an important aspect of present-day dandyism that differentiates it from its Euro-American homologues, where new and branded clothes are usually favoured. Moreover, it is the most immediate referent of the retro style through which the members of the subculture proactively consume history and express racial consciousness. The recourse to objects of the past and the creative process of crafting new looks out of them provokes a ‘textile flash-back’ (Jenß 2005: 179) that augments the value of a garment. Dressing up in vintage clothes ‘uses the potential of dress as a cultural signal of time and an important component of cultural memory, historic consciousness and imagery. In fashion […] retro gains a very particular quality, because with the garment as the object closest to the body, time and history […] are literally “in touch”’ (Jenß 2005: 179).

Once again, a desire to index the social history of racial subjugation through high-brow dress informs aesthetic choices modelled on parameters of prim-ness and respectability. This is part of a widespread effort by African dandies to manufacture a positive narrative of the continent. Gebhardt populates his blog with visual testimonies of his policy of keeping alive ‘the legendary era that has been left behind by our ancestors’ (Afful 2014), while keeping true to his grandfather’s motto of always being ‘well dressed and well groomed so people will start respecting you’ (Cahn 2014). This is also what inspired his collaboration with Khumbula, a community of ‘passionate vintage fashion lovers’ from South Africa (Messy Nessy 2014). Choosing for their name the Zulu word for ‘Remember’, Khumbula promote an affirmative, pan-Africanist message of elegance. Their fashion manifesto advocates a politics of dress that rejects the negative stereotypes of a ravaged continent.

The current generations of African offspring’s [sic] are making moves that will preserve and revolutionize how the world looks at Africa. From now on thou shall not dress this continent in bloody war outfit because Africa is now married to a gentleman. As the people of Khumbula continue dressing up the voluptuous Africa in well cut [sic] majestic couture.

(Khumbula 2014)

This intent is also 2ManySiblings’s first port of call: ‘We’re about […] encourag-ing people to see Africa in a an appreciative light’ (Okayafrica n.d.). In this view, Africanness accounts for both an identity statement and an aesthetic language that unifies with the power and appreciation of a beautiful sartorial aesthet-ics. Gebhardt’s penchant for bright colours and batik/wax texture is inspired by this pan-Africanist view. The colours that he chooses for his collections ‘tell a story through unity, that as individuals living in the African continent, although we may have different cultures – for example Zulus, Vendas, Xhosas in South Africa,; Oshiwambo, Otjiherero, Damaras in Namibia – we remain one’ (de Greef 2014, sic). By being visually arresting, the costuming of choice of the dandies from the continent are deeply affective. Their jazzy surface is a broadcasting medium that sets an example and influences social behav-iour, contributing to the spreading of a positive self-representation of men. For his designs, Gebhardt employs predominantly African fabric.15 He explains

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16. Solange Knowles’ video ‘Losing You’ and Daniele Tamagni’s photographic book Gentlemen of Bacongo (2009) represent the sapeurs as peacocks. The vibrant colours of their outfits and striking poses emerge at unlikely places to provide the strong contrasts that keep the spectacle lodged in the mind. Unsurprisingly, introducing Tamagni’s work, Paul Smith bases his positive remarks on the photographer’s ability to set the sapeurs’ ‘attention to detail [and] use of colour […] against the environment they live in’ (Tamagni 2009).

that ‘[t]he inspiration for the African fabric that I’m using is the light of the African legacy – the light of the late Nelson Mandela and the leaders on the African continent who have inspired us to be where we are now’ (Cahn 2014). This network of memory is what makes African dandies a socially conscious subculture. As we have seen, with vintage apparel and local fabric Khumbula, Gebhardt, 2ManySiblings, and the Smartists pass on the social knowledge of racial subjection of the colonial and apartheid years and an intergenerational engagement with racial uplift. In light of his pan-African views, Gebhardt also calls on the sapeurs, which, according to him and the Khumbula collective, ‘influenced us in such a way that it made us discover our style and personality by reaching in to the depths of our past for the rich cultural heritage left to us by our ancestors’ (Messy Nessy 2014).

the sliPPery sloPe of ‘afro cool’

The forms of male retrospective sartorialism discussed in this article engage in a creative rediscovery of the politics of respectable dressing of the late colonial and postcolonial decades, vesting an engagement with community empow-erment, cultural pride, generational relations and racism, with a playful and appealing aesthetics.

It could be argued that historical excavations tinge the sartorial manifesta-tions with nostalgia. But, if nostalgia’s longing for the past is often conserv-ative, the examples I cite are instead informed by a reformative goal. The performances of dandyism found on blogs, social-media and lifestyle publica-tions showcase the vestimentary aesthetics as a desirable outcome of syncretic designs of wax and kente fabrics, tribal symbols, ethnic jewellery, local styles of coiffure, and decorative garments, along with mainstream clothing. This regime of sartorial visibility travels globally from the street-style hubs of Africa to western lifestyle publications and big media outlets, feeding global interest in the remixing of past and present sartorial traditions. African dandy sartorialists are a recurring feature on the listings of fashion influencers of trend-hunting sites and a global phenomenon on social media. Online, the syncretic ensem-bles become accessible, their affective value mingling with the more mone-tary-driven one of self-promotion. Often, as in the case of Gebhardt’s original creations, users are reminded that the garments are on sale in Namibian shops. In other cases, the creative exploit their success to secure deals with photog-raphers, fashion editors, and fellow artists. The commercial value inscribed in these performances of taste is not lost to mainstream actors. Occasionally, visibility earns some dandies a place on the catwalk. In recent years, for exam-ple, sapeurs and swenkas have appeared in globally acclaimed productions by brands like Guinness and Nokia, with celebrities like Solange Knowles and Paul Smith showing an interest in the phenomenon.16 This mainstream gaze comments emphatically on the style and occasionally its promoters, present-ing them as the advocates of an alluring brand of Afro-diasporic identity. Its appeal derives from a combination of eye-catching style and the seemingly joyous and bohemian message that it conveys. This translates into uncompli-cated celebrations of ‘joie de vivre’ and self-determination – as Guinness has it in its advertisement inspired by sapologie (2014), where dressing to the nines equates to taking control of one’s destiny in the face of the stereotypical hard-ships associated with being African and black (Picarelli 2014).

Arguably, the dandy African subculture is caught in the process of renam-ing and re-representation that is coalescing around the signifier ‘Afropolitan’.

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Its sophisticated remixing of ‘African’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ elements participates in the positive embracing of vernacularism and multi-sited belonging advo-cated by academic and novelists alike (Mbembe 2007; Selasi 2005), contribut-ing to shift the focus from racial authenticity to cultural and aesthetic modes of self-representation. In this light, being African arises from fluid performances of identity, where self-apprehension occurs from an inscription into the equally fluid evolution of global sensitivities and acts of representation. Arguably, Afro-diasporic dress practices encourage syncretic self-presentation. In her study of black style, Carol Tulloch underlines how they have always woven ‘a network’ of ‘traceable associations of objects-people-geographies-activism-histories’ (2010: 296) sustained by affective bonds. What present-day African dandies add to this incorporation of diasporic threads is a proactive effort, literally design-ing the self through traceable extractions and networked negotiations of style. The dandies capture the extent of such negotiations on the mutable surface of their bodies and of the screens of new media, so that fashion choices become driving forces in the material crafting of a shareable sense of self. On this aspect, Marleen de Witte writes that the bonding power of ‘cool’ dress practices inspired by an African sensibility is aiding a ‘social-aesthetic work’ of self-iden-tification for a generation of young, Afro-cosmopolitan subjects (2014: 264). By means of stylistic choices, past and present memories of racial history and heritage are apprehended and made cool. Contemporary African dandyism feeds this processual dynamics of identification with ‘jazz-age’ sensibility. Its protagonists exercise sartorial wit to keep alive a sense of geographical and racial identity rooted in the sensorial memories of the black diaspora and drive fluid modes of self-presentation. As a medium of ‘Afro-cool’, contemporary dandyism evidences how, in Africa, a cult of elegance and decorum anticipated present concerns with self-making, employing flamboyancy and gentility to expose the ‘interweaving of the here and there’ that Mbembe (2007: 28) reads into the Afropolitan experience. At the same time, the efforts of Khumbula, Gebhardt, and the Smartists to participate in global narratives of cool threat-ens to reduce this sartorial sensibility to a brand, a prêt-à-porter reservoir of cultural and aesthetic markers devoid of meaning.

Certainly, their media-savvy nature sartorialism makes it liable to cultural and neo-capitalist appropriation. Its visibility on mainstream media might appease the ‘demand for more authentic, virgin, black culture to consume’ that Emma Dabiri (2014) attributes to western endorsements of the Afropolitan discourse. According to Dabiri, the rising fame of phenomena of grassroot and street-style Afro-sartorialism is the ‘latest manifestation of a planetary commerce in blackness’ (2014). Other studies also caution against the risk of commodification inherent in the globalization of vernacular sartorialism (de Witte 2014; Sylvanus 2007). Failing to acknowledge the ways in which such forms of appropriation and deployment of vestimentary knowledge also express dissatisfaction with official narratives of modernization, they look at just one side of the coin. The youths of Africa are leading a rediscovery of cultural history, developing an aesthetic sensibility that retraces the steps of black emancipation, while repurposing it to new ends. Ultimately, African dandyism participates in a redefinition of racial and geographical identities steeped in ambiguities. The two aspects coexist in the retrospective sarto-rialism of young creative who act on these aporias, mobilizing elegance and craftsmanship both as a tool of self-promotion and to claim a cosmo-politan citizenship, steeped in allure and the sensorial memory of colonial subjugation.

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suggested citation

Picarelli, E. (2015), ‘Elegance and retrospective sartorialism among young African males’, Clothing Cultures 2: 2, pp. 209–223, doi: 10.1386/cc.2.2.209_1

contributor details

Enrica Picarelli has a Ph.D in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone World from the University of Naples, ‘L’Orientale’. Her research interests bring together cultural theory, media theory, postcolonial studies and gender studies, touching upon questions of representation and affect transmission.

Contact: Universidade de Lisboa, 1649-004 Lisboa.E-mail: enrica.picarelli@campus.ul.pt

Enrica Picarelli has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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