In one of the world's poorest countries, a group of men earning roughly the equivalent of a few hundred dollars a month dress in designer suits and walk the streets of Congo with extraordinary poise. They call themselves SAPEUR, and this photo book brings you face to face with them across 208 pages of newly shot portraits and street scenes.
Photographer Kunio Chano, based in Okinawa, traveled to Congo and worked at considerable personal risk to capture these images. What you get is not a distant anthropological survey but close, direct photography of men who treat clothing as a declaration of who they are. Sévrin Mouengo, one of the sapeurs who visited Japan, put it simply: fashion is how you express yourself, and you don't dirty your clothes over a pointless fight.
The sapeurs drew wide attention after appearing in NHK documentary programming, and this volume was made to preserve that energy in print. Anyone drawn to street style, menswear, portrait photography, or the ways fashion carries meaning far beyond the runway will find plenty to linger over here.
The text is in Japanese, but the book is built around the photographs. Published by Oakla Publishing.
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