Abstract
This article offers a reflexive ethnographic account of how clothing shaped the author’s fieldwork among Congolese refugees in Nairobi, Kenya. Prompted by a passing comment on her “baggy trousers,” the author traces how her clothed body became both a site and method of inquiry, revealing how fashion mediates selfhood and knowledge production. Through efforts to begin to ‘dress Congolese,’ the author engaged in a process of sartorial and bodily transformation that revealed the researchers’ body as a dynamic research instrument. The author illustrates how clothing choices shaped her presence in the field, the quality of interactions with interlocutors, and her own being-in-the-world. Empirical vignettes—from shopping with a local Sapeur to getting tailored outfits—demonstrate how dress functioned as both ethnographic material and a methodological tool, offering insights into Congolese aesthetics of distinction, appropriateness, and style. In doing so, the paper argues that recognizing the fashioned body as a key medium through which researchers engage with the world can deepen understandings of researcher identity, fieldwork dynamics, and situated knowledge.
Keywords
Introduction
“Why are your trousers so baggy?” Dinah, my Congolese research assistant, asked me on our way to an interview in downtown Nairobi. I glanced down, surprised. I thought they looked fine until I compared them with her form-fitting jeans. I looked at my reflection in a shop window, noticing for the first time the way they drooped lethargically around my thighs and hips, pooling around my running shoes. I chose my outfit that morning solely on what would grant the agility needed to navigate Nairobi’s hectic sidewalks and curl into packed matatus (public buses). Making me even more self-conscious, the interviewee we were on our way to meet, a Congolese university student, arrived dressed head-to-toe in Gucci, expertly tailored to his frame. When I complimented his outfit, remarking that he stood out among the other more casually dressed students, he told me that fashion “reflects your character- it shows you’re organized, prepared, and respectful. It’s something I learned since I was young- show respect by dressing well.” Under the table, I self-consciously smoothed out the wrinkles in my trousers with my palm and scribbled a note in my field journal: “Dress more Congolese”.
Fashion 1 specifically, particularly in the context of researcher reflexivity, though slowly taking a more prominent position within ethnographic studies, has been a historically under-researched theme, possibly due to a lack of a clear-cut theoretical framework or methodological approach (Kawamura, 2020, 2). Some qualitative researchers have written about how they modelled their clothing after the styles of their participants, 2 yet beyond descriptions of outfits, such discussions often remain superficial (Coffey, 1999, 60; Longhurst et al., 2008). 3 While the embodied turn in social science research has increasingly acknowledged researchers’ and participants’ bodies within qualitative methodological considerations (Shilling, 2012; Thanem and Knights, 2019), limited attention has been given to the haptic knowledges generated by ones’ fashion and body in the field.
This paper is about fashion, but it is equally about bodies, or the researchers’ body, to be precise. As anthropologist Joanne Entwistle (2015, 1) reminds us, “fashion is about bodies.” French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002, 169), in his development of a phenomenological 4 philosophy, emphasises that it is through our bodies that we make sense of things, serving as our “general medium for having a world.” In my own efforts to commit myself to dressing Congolese, the Merleau-Pontian dialectic between body and self revealed the two to be blended, continually shaping how I presented my body in certain spaces as an object to be seen and touched, giving me new self-consciousness of my body and being-in-the-world as a researcher. By weaving together empirical experiences, this paper contributes to discussions the role of clothing in the construction of researcher identity. Beyond simply describing my physical transformation during my research experience, I detail the phenomenological dimensions of clothing, or the ‘phenomenon of being dressed’, i.e. the way that clothing made me feel, and how I felt about the clothes (Ruggerone, 2016). I describe how my body became a field site of its own, with its own haptic geographies and ways of knowing. These clothing choices impacted not only how I felt but also how I was perceived, and became a methodological tool, shaping my interactions in the field and revealing how attire can act as an active participant in the research process. I discuss the sartorial choices of my participants, as well, including a discussion on what it means to ‘dress Congolese’ and ethnographic vignettes of shopping for an outfit with a local “Sapeur”, a member of a Congolese sub-culture, and visiting a tailor. In doing so, I weave together the clothing-body-culture nexus of Congolese with my own to illustrate how their clothing choices and behaviours shaped my own, resulting in more embodied knowledge of myself and the field.
Research context
The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over 9 months in 2019 and 2020 in Nairobi, Kenya, as part of a doctorate in International Development at the University of Edinburgh. I conducted four focus group discussions and over 52 open-ended interviews with Congolese refugees and asylum-seekers, who were primarily from the eastern and north-eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC hereafter). The participants, all over the age of 18, included students, pastors, tailors, musicians, hair stylists, and shopkeepers. Additionally, I held over a dozen informal interviews with Kenyan citizens and migrants of other nationalities who interacted with Congolese individuals. I also engaged in participant observation by ‘apprenticing’ at a Congolese-owned and managed kinyozi (hair salon), in downtown Nairobi. In this article, I also discuss interactions with a leader of a local group of Les Sapes (also known as Sapeurs) a Congolese fashion sub-culture (Sape is an abbreviation of La Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes), and at one point organized a fashion photoshoot to see these colourful fashionistas in action. 5
Prior to beginning my doctoral research, I had given very little thought to what I would be wearing in the field. It was not something I ever remembered being covered in class or the research methodology literature I read. Yet as the weeks passed in Nairobi, it very quickly became apparent that fashion was a key component in how migrants in the city forged inclusion and wellbeing through the leveraging of fluid identities, development of social interdependencies, and cultivation of spaces of belonging. At the time I conducted research, and still to this day, the restrictions to formal employment and mobility put in place by the Government of Kenya presented significant barriers to both registered refugees and undocumented migrants (Lugulu and Moyomba, 2023; Opi, 2024). Restrictive governmental policies, along with the humanitarian imagery surrounding ‘the refugee’ figure- a suffering, passive, and unidimensional persona- belies the complex and vibrant lives of Congolese in the city. For many of them, looking and feeling good was a critical tool for ethno-cultural expression, subjectivity, and self-determination within contexts of socio-political exclusion.
Dressing congolese
Early in my research, I asked many of the Congolese I interviewed what it meant to them to dress Congolese. To the Congolese university student I mentioned earlier, it meant “dressing official, so smart.” Others reiterated this concept of dressing stylishly and well-put-together. To an 18-year-old Congolese female born in Kenya, “cladi (‘fashionable clothing’ in Sheng, Swahili-English slang), means to wear good clothes, something that is so presentable so that teenagers look at you and think, ‘yeah, that girl knows how to dress’”. There does seem to be a je ne sais quoi about ‘Congolese style’- it may be difficult to describe, but you know it when you see it. “It’s ‘stylish’ and ‘fashionable’ (etoka in Kibembe and kitoka in Lingala), one man in his 40s told me. “It means dressing in an orderly manner.”
To others, it also meant the purchasing and exhibiting of luxury goods over necessities, indicative of Thorstein Veblen's (1899) concept of conspicuous consumption. 6 As one sapeur told me, “You give $100 dollars to a Kenyan, he will buy food. A Congolese will buy a nice pair of shoes.” This was countered somewhat by one of the sapeurs who told me, “It’s not about the cost, it’s about how you wear it.” Both points speak to the “aesthetics of excess” (Sylvanus, 2019, 45), and the prioritization of purchasing luxury items, or at least the impression of luxury, over necessities. As well as style and cost, the origins of the clothing matter; one Congolese man told me that they generally dress better than Kenyans because “we wear clothes made of materials from France, Italy, and England.” When I asked another Congolese man if he could tell the difference between a Congolese and a Kenyan person just by looking at them, he tsked his tongue and said bluntly, “Kenyan men look homeless. Doesn’t matter if they’re businessmen; they all look shabby. You know, oversized trousers, poorly fitted jackets.” Such comments reflect how sartorial distinctiveness was often tied to ethno-cultural identity. As a male university student told me, “Dressing different is one way I maintain my Congolese identity in Kenya”. Similarly, Gloria, the wife of a theology student at a university, and a woman I never saw out of her long kitenge dresses, told me, “I never changed the way I look. If someone looks at me, they know I’m Congolese. The way I dress- I don’t wear trousers. I wear lots of kitenge.” When I asked her why, she said, “Because I am Congolese! I am not Kenyan! Some people like to change to fit in, but not me. I think it’s good to be different”.
After learning these lessons of what it meant to dress Congolese, I committed to staying tidy, keeping mud and dust off of myself to the best of my ability, and adding flashy accessories to my outfits like chunky bracelets and branded brooches. I began to adorn myself in high-end labels, like Chanel, Gucci, and Tom Ford, though always knock-offs found at local second-hand clothing markets, which permitted me and my participants to circumvent financial limitations to engage in global trends (Nyberg, 2017). The discussion that follows goes beyond (or perhaps, beneath) the clothing and accessories themselves to investigate the implications of a dressed body in the field.
Discussion
The following discussion provides a phenomenological account of my interactions with fashion in Nairobi- the buying, wearing, tailoring, and performance of it- and the ontological and epistemological insights it afforded. I organise the discussion into two sections exploring different ways of experiencing fashion and the field, first through the gaze (seeing and being seen) and second through touch. These two categories of experience are not so distinct from one another; Merleau-Ponty (1964) speaks, for example, of the haptic qualities of the gaze: “– but something to which we could not be closer than by palpating it with our look…the gaze itself envelops them, clothes them with its own flesh” (173, my emphasis). For the sake of analytical convenience, however, I divide them here.
Gaze and transformation in a mtumba market
In this section, I explore Congolese sartorial distinction in Nairobi, grounding it in an ethnographic vignette of a shopping trip with a sapeur. I examine the tensions between visibility and risk, authenticity and performance, and my embodiment as a fieldwork tool. Perhaps no one better encapsulates the value of fashion and dress among the Congolese than the sapeurs. These individuals in Nairobi are not necessarily representative of the broader Congolese community in the city, given their relatively limited visibility, especially when compared to the prominence of La Sape in places like Kinshasa, Brazzaville, or Paris. Nevertheless, their mindset and fashion choices echo broader patterns I observed among other Congolese. Like Nairobi’s sapeurs, many others choose to leave their homes dressed in vibrant colours and striking styles that proclaim, “I am Congolese!”—a daring act in a context where being a foreigner carries both real and imagined risks.
It is difficult to define what sapologie, or the sapeur movement is, exactly. This is reflected by the president of the Congolese Association Culture et SAPE (ACS), who when asked, suggested “La SAPE, c’est comme une girafe. On a du mal à dire ce que c’est, mais on la reconnaît immédiatement” (“La Sape is like a giraffe. It’s difficult to describe what it is, but you recognise it immediately”) (Michalon 2015). When I asked Maurice, the leader of a local chapter, he insisted it is more than just the clothing; “There is fashion, and then there is Sapologie. Sapologie is a movement.” Thinking of La Sape as a cohesive and defined ‘movement’ in Nairobi may be misleading, however; rather than a single collective, La Sape is composed of multiple smaller groups, each with their own membership criteria and leadership. I met Maurice through Dinah, who had a Congolese friend who knew him personally. Maurice’s group of sapeurs consists of 15 individuals, 14 men and one woman. 7 According to him, there were more than 20 different Sape clubs based in Nairobi, mainly comprised of Congolese and a few Nigerians and Ghanaians. Within his group, I only met him and two other members- Ziggy, a lanky 20-something man, and Esther, also in her mid-twenties.
While sapeurs enjoy a kind of celebrity status in the DRC, in Nairobi they are more often met with confusion or mild amusement than admiration. I don’t recall encountering a single Kenyan who recognized the movement when I brought it up. For most, Sapeurs were simply folded into the broader category of the Congolese ‘community’ in the city. When I showed photos of the sharply dressed men and women to Kenyan friends, their responses were typically along the lines of, “Ah yes, that’s a Congolese for you. So extravagant.” Even many Congolese I interviewed, though familiar with La Sape, were unaware of its presence in Nairobi. Unlike in parts of Kinshasa, Brazzaville, or Paris, spotting a Sapeur on the streets of Nairobi is rare—you have to actively seek them out, usually through someone with a direct personal connection.
I wanted to meet all of the sapeurs of Muarice’s group together at once to see how they interacted as a group, but it was difficult to find a time to make this happen. As well, when I did meet some of them for interviews, I was disappointed to see that they did not show up in the extravagant outfits I had hoped to see. They were still very well-dressed, but lacked the vibrant and exaggerated lines and colours I had heard stories of. Maurice told me that such outfits were reserved for special occasions or Sapeur-specific gatherings where they would engage in a défilé (French for catwalk). This was the traditional Sape performative walk to exhibit ones’ ensemble, with slow and elongated strides to show off designer labels with flourish. Hoping to incentivise them, and with Maurice’s consent, I organised and paid for a photoshoot in downtown Nairobi and invited each of the Sapeurs within his group.
Wanting to join in the photoshoot for the sake of participant observation, prior to the photoshoot, I accompanied Maurice to ‘Toi Market’, one of the city’s largest mtubma markets, to pick out a Sape-worthy outfit for me. We twisted and turned our way through narrow walkways between stalls, eyeing cardboard signs perched up against stacks of clothes advertising jeans for 200 Ksh and men’s blazers for Ksh 500 (roughly USD2.00 and USD5.00, respectively). Many vendors specialized in one form of clothing or accessory- one stall exclusively sold blue jeans, another displayed only a wall of leather jackets, and next to him, a table of Converse high-tops. Vendors shouted across the aisles to each other or slapped wrinkles out of their hanging wares. We wound our way through billowing folds of wedding dresses, soft mountains of baby booties, and curtains of blue jeans. Tarps and corrugated metal roofing hung over the expanses of the inner market, and the occasional hanging lightbulb would cast a yellow glow over the frilled curtains and chaotic mounds of clothing hung or perched atop every available surface. It felt like we were being consumed by the clothing as we pushed through.
Merleau-Ponty suggested that bodies are situated in specific temporal and spatial contexts; the clothing that sits upon these bodies, then, should also be seen as existing in place and time (Entwistle 2000, 334). Reflecting on the body-clothing-time nexus, Wilson (1985) discusses the discomfort felt in a costume museum, seeing clothing “that had an innate relationship with human beings long since gone …” (1). Similarly, Entwistle (2000) describes the feeling of ‘alienation from the body’ when one finds a garment with signs of previous wear, like the shape of feet pressed into shoes. The mtumba market did not hold the ‘dusty silence’ of Wilson’s (1985) costume museum, with its hectic presentation of fashionable possibility. Yet the smells of the clothing were, for me, the strongest tie to bodies that once filled the sleeves and pant legs. We breathed in the smells of the fabrics and the strangers that wore them, that unmistakable odour that hangs in every second-hand clothing store- notes of must, dampness, and soft legacies of cigarette smoke.
Maurice shopped quickly and deftly, his fingers flitting between the stacks of clothing to peer at the labels sewn in. The lack of designer labels did not deter him. At one point, he handed me a pair of thigh-high rainbow stockings. “These?” I asked doubtfully, holding them up against the neon orange blazer he had given me. He nodded, already on the hunt for a pair of trousers to tie together this otherworldly outfit. I went behind a hanging bedsheet that served as a curtain to change into my new outfit, and caught myself in the mirror in a state of half-change. I still had my shapeless trousers on, along with the lime green blouse and orange blazer. Merleau-Ponty writes about the intermingling of the visual and the physical that we notice when we look at ourselves in the mirror, whereby a reflection: Refers me back to an original of the body which is not out there among things but in my own province, on this side of all things seen…The body is not an object in the world but our means of communication with it. It is the horizon latent in all our experience and itself ever-present and anterior to every determining thought (1962: 91-2).
My awareness of my body and the clothing on it was not derived from my reflection alone, but rather, informed by my physical engagement with the market, its products, and the other people around me. The blending of fashions and identities I saw in the mirror and felt on my body reflected other reconfigurations around me, of consumers and the consumed. Having embraced ‘dressing Congolese’, I was not distant nor detached, but rather adopted a collective fiction about what it meant to dress a certain way.
Pulling myself from my own gaze at myself in the mirror, I emerged from behind the curtain to be greeted by Maurice, who applauded my ensemble: rainbow socks, tangerine-coloured trousers and matching blazer with a golden lapel pin, a lime green blouse and a black necktie. I felt the bemused expressions of the shopkeeper and other clientele on me. Spaces like the clothing market, the tailor’s shop, and the fashion photoshoot were settings where my body became ‘an object to be looked at’ (Entwistle, 2000, 30) with a far higher degree of self-consciousness. Being the object of others’ gazes was nothing new in the field, particularly in the informal settlements where there were few other Caucasians. Yet previously, I had lacked the desire to be looked at, employing ‘technologies of the body’ (Mauss, 1973) to remain under the radar (like wearing baggy sweaters and trousers). Ever since my efforts to dress Congolese, however, and especially now in the market in my bright ensemble, I had the full intent of differentiating myself from others around me. I was acutely aware of my modified silhouette and the eyes on my body from Maurice, the shopkeeper, and fellow shoppers. Were they looking at me, or the eclectic outfit? Or were they not one and the same? Sartre speaks about the power of ‘the look’ and how one constructs meaning through it: “But in order for me to be what I am, it suffices merely that the Other look at me…Thus for the Other I have stripped myself of transcendence…I grasp the Other’s look at the very center of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities…But suddenly the alienation of myself, which is the act of being-looked-at, involves the alienation of the world I organize (1966: 351–353).
Similarly, Merleau-Ponty (1956) suggests that rather than serving as static sources of seeing other people and things, it is our bodies that enable us to be seen by others, as “the visible form of our intentions” (5). I had mentioned previously the sartorial distinctiveness that many Congolese chose to embrace. Yet it is significant to mention, here, that despite many Congolese I spoke with insisting on ‘dressing different’, most did not wear ‘flashy’ outfits in their day-to-day lives. Instead, their distinction was expressed in more subtle ways. A finely tailored suit, for example, rather than an extravagant coloured outfit. Oftentimes, the degree of distinctiveness depends on spatial and temporal context: as one young woman residing in the Kabiria settlement told me, “In town during a crack-down (on illegal immigrants), I’ll do my best to blend in.” I realized that my ‘dressing Congolese’ could transcend specific temporal and spatial contexts with little consequence from the ‘critical gaze of others’ which makes one uncomfortable (Miller and Woodward, 2012, 83), whether real or imagined, unlike Maurice and other Congolese. Whereas Maurice had to sacrifice his distinctiveness for the sake of comfort (in the sense of less consciousness of negative attention) in the market and on the streets of Nairobi, I was able to embrace it.
Spaces like the clothing market were a setting where my body became ‘an object to be looked at’ (Entwistle, 2000, 30) with a far higher degree of self-consciousness. I initially felt shy, standing partially shielded behind the bedsheet. I felt the tensions between ‘authenticity and artifice’ (Finkelstein (1991): in a way, I felt truer to myself, liking the feel of my elevated feet in heels, the form-fitting trousers, the tailored blazer that showed off my feminine curves. Yet I also feared I was appropriating the Congolese style, a cheap counterfeit, just like my brass Chanel pin. Such tensions that arise through researcher clothing choices are explored by others (see Abu-Lughod 2016; Narayan 2011), who interrogate the complexities of ‘culture’ that complicate the concept of appropriation. Congolese in Nairobi certainly do not fit into a homogenous culture of any sort, including material cultures. Subjectivities like socio-economic class, whether they were from the West or East of DRC, how long they had been in Nairobi, and age all seemed to influence how they viewed and exhibited clothing, hair and accessories. If my dressing like the Congolese was a “fiction”, to quote Geertz (1973, 154), then the Congolese themselves were participating in their own fiction of what it meant to dress Congolese.
Nothing fit quite perfectly- the trousers were half a size too small, as were the shoes. This brought heightened awareness to specific parts of my body that felt the stretch or strain most prominently, both for my own internal awareness (like how the tight plastic shoes pinched my toes) and concern that other would see (trousers stretched across my thighs; straining blouse buttons), making my hyper aware of the other male shoppers around me and where their gaze was directed. This heightened sense of awareness of how clothing interacts with the body and, in turn, shapes behavior, is described by Eco (1986) as “epidermic self-awareness”. He describes how his blue jeans feel after gaining some weight, for example, saying, As a result, I lived in the knowledge that I had jeans on, whereas normally we live forgetting that we’re wearing undershorts or trousers. I lived for my jeans and as a result I assumed an exterior behavior of one who wears jeans. In any case, I assumed a demeanor … Not only did the garment impose a demeanor on me; by focusing my attention on demeanor it obliged me to live towards the exterior world (192–194).
I was also mindful that I was being dressed with seemingly less observance of the ‘rules’ of Congolese dress. I had been told by many that proper fit was paramount, particularly when wearing a suit. When I asked one young man, for example, how Kenyan men dressed compared to Congolese, he blew air out of his mouth and smirked. “Go into the slums, or into the CBD [Central Business District, or downtown Nairobi]. Look how the men dress, with suit jackets two sizes too big.” For him, there was no difference between fashion in the poorer or richer parts of the city; all Kenyans lacked style and taste, as evidenced by the improper fit of their suits. The fact that I was being dressed in garments one or two sizes too small, then, made me wonder if this was due to limited options at the market or my body existed outside the parameters of such sartorial regulations because I was not Congolese. Or, was my body a sort of doll in a game of dress-up? Or a combination of the three?
The combination of improper fit and the garish colours stripped any chance of ‘comfort’, in the sense of forgetting I was wearing it (see Miller and Woodward, 2012, Chapter 4), yet I was not uncomfortable, per se. On the contrary, despite the tightness of the fabric and the self-consciousness it brought, I felt a sense of pleasure in the way my outfit made Maurice so happy. In the process of ‘being dressed’ by another, feelings of doubt gave way to a relaxation of having someone else navigate the stalls and salespeople, handpicking garments for this curated outfit. The final ensemble was someone else’s vision, but my body and willingness to wear it were making it a reality. There was little certainty here around the implications of this transformation, yet I was acutely aware of both the increased visibility it brought me with the targeted gazes on my body from strangers and a deeper connectivity with Maurice.
In the embodied experience of shopping and dressing Congolese, I became more than an observer, transforming into an active participant in processes that blurred the boundaries between self and other, authenticity and artifice, research and performance. Phenomenology reminds us that the body is not simply a static object, but serves as the vehicle for our being-in-the-world. Clothing, similarly, is not superficial, but an important linkage between bodies and material cultures. In shopping at the mtumba market, being dressed by Maurice and surrounded by countless pieces worn by strangers, I was not just mirroring the outfits of my participants, but also embodying frictions around visibilities and belonging.
Haptics, gendered dress, and the embodied researcher
Having heard so much praise for the tailoring skills of the Congolese, I asked for a recommendation from one of my research participants. Dinah and I found the shop tucked in the back of a line of fabric stalls in downtown Nairobi, a tiny dark room lit by a humming bulb, the walls an eclectic mosaic of stacked vitenge (singl. kitenge). 8 A sewing machine sat on a table on one side, flanked by dresses and men’s shirts hanging off the wall in various stages of completion. I wanted to pick a fabric for a custom-made dress, and after much deliberation, running my fingers across the stiff spines of the wax fabrics on the shelves, I chose one I liked- a psychedelic swirl of blue paisley shapes against a green background.
I had never been measured for an outfit before, and I was struck by the intimate proximity it required with the tailor as he moved around my motionless body with a rapid flair of his hands and measuring tape. The process opened up dimensions of another I would not otherwise have known: I remember hearing his breathing, for example, even over the buzz of the traffic out on the street, and I realized that likely meant he could hear mine too. I could smell him, too, a mix of sweat and musk, and I felt the fabric of my shirt press into my damp skin as he held the measuring tape against various points of my body.
Similar to a time when I had my hair washed and my head massaged at the Congolese kinyozi I apprenticed at in Nairobi, I was struck by the dynamics at play during this haptic experience of a researcher being touched by others in the field. Anthropology has historically been steeped in notions of the researcher-Other dichotomy, whereby racialized science considered ‘primitive’ cultures those to be places only for scholarly extraction and the tourist gaze (Nichols 2009, 133–34). Still in today’s ethnographic research, the participants are the source from which much is taken- words, images, signatures- but this moment of standing still and silent, the giving of my body to be measured and touched, later to pay money for the tailoring services, was a shifting of the parameters of that relationship. As I felt the tape measure press against my thigh and feel his skin brush against mine, I felt the entanglement of intimacy and patronage. Merleau-Ponty’s (2002) notion of ‘reversibility’ stresses the reciprocity of sensation; to be touched is not just to passively receive, but to engage with the world. 9 The example he gives is touching one hand with their other, which produces a simultaneous effect of touching and being touched, and a blurring of subject-object. I would extend this beyond my own body- by being touched by the tailor, or by any of the other Congolese I met during clothing-focused interactions- whether being measured, having bracelets pushed over my wrists, or getting my hair done- my body was touching them back. Like Merleau-Ponty’s concept of reversibility, this also revealed subject-object ambiguities.
Not only did I encounter new haptic dimensions with other people through my dressing, but also with the very clothing on my body. Both textiles and styles that were new for me, like vitenge dresses, as well as pieces that were very familiar, like blue jeans, revealed fresh understandings of the physical-social interplay of my body in the field. Butler and Trouble (1990) suggests that gender is performed, and dress serves as one of the most obvious components in this performance among Congolese. Among women, this is perhaps no more so than as indicated by the long dresses and skirts made from vitenge, particularly on Sundays. I never got accustomed to the feel of the impregnable fabric of this wax textile. It demanded constant awareness of its presence against my body, choking my ribs and stomach, pulling my shoulders back while smothering my chest. Not only did I feel the physical restrictiveness of the form-fitting fabric, but I also experienced the social constraints enforced by cultural norms, its constructions mirroring the restrictive expectations of certain bodily coverage and behaviour of women.
For many of the women I asked, dressing Congolese meant “kuvaa vizuri” (literally “dressing well” in Swahili), which was often used interchangeable with the notion of dressing modestly. A woman in her early thirties from the Fizi district in DRC, for example, told me, “We dress fashionably to cover up our bodies (“kujisitili” in Swahili) to be presentable, unlike Kenyan women who wear short skirts and dresses exposing their bodies to the public.” She continued, “Kenyan teenagers dress in short clothing and appear like prostitutes in the eye of the public, most especially the Congolese elders”. This view was shared by another Congolese woman, also in her thirties from Fizi district, how said that “wearing short skirts and dresses popular among Kenyans is not allowed in the Congolese culture.”
Illustrating Merleau-Ponty’s (1956) emphasis on the temporal significance of the body as it generates our “point of view on the world” (1956, 5), for the Congolese, dressing modestly was a spectrum and highly context-based. As Dinah told me, “Native is for Sundays”, meaning that among many of the Congolese women, ‘native’, or ‘traditional’ outfits of vitenge skirts and dresses were worn on Sundays, and more ‘modern’ or Western clothing, like blue jeans, were worn Monday to Saturday. Similarly, as a child I was required to ‘dress up’ for church on Sundays as a sign of respect. This typically entailed wearing frilly dresses, nylon stockings, and shiny dress shoes. I vividly remember the whispered scolds from my mother when I would sprawl out on the wooden pew in boredom, “keepyourlegstogether!” Anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1973) talks about the “techniques of the body” as “the ways in which from society to society men [sic] know how to use their bodies” (70), though he adds that these ways of knowing are derived from an education imposed on them (76). As a girl, my mother taught me to sit a certain way. Now, I was undergoing a new kind of education—learning from the way other women moved on Sundays and from the fabric itself, which restricted my legs. The textile reshaped my bodily habits, subtly altering how I sat and walked—movements that had come to signify modesty and piety on Sunday mornings in Nairobi.
With the exception of Sunday mornings or cultural events, I was far more likely to wear blue jeans, which were also popular among other young women outside of Sundays. Just as the unforgiving fabric of the vitenge mediated my movement and behaviour, so too did the form-fitting jeans, though in very different ways. Both brought a sharper sense of the femaleness of my body in the way they hugged my body’s curves, yet compared to the restrictive fabric of the vitenge, which made me feel involuntarily poised, the blue jeans, with their Lycra blend, were freeing. I was able to move my limbs in a way not possible with the wax fabric- I could straddle a boda boda, leap over rain-filled crevices in the sidewalk, and contort my body to climb into the back of packed matatus.
I also found that my personality was transformed, particularly in my interactions with my predominantly male research participants. By the time I started regularly wearing blue jeans to my research field site, particularly a community-based organization where I spent most of my time, oftentimes just sitting in plastic lawn chairs and sipping milky sweet chai, I had already developed a sense of familiarity with several male individuals. Of course, I cannot say for sure if my male participants viewed me differently after I started wearing more form-fitting clothing, though I did receive many compliments, particularly when I would wear European labels like my Gucci purse and Chanel brooch. Regardless of what they felt towards me, I certainly felt a shift in self-perception, and with it, a change in the way I engaged with male participants. It is certainly also due to the familiarity I had built with the participants, but when I felt prettier and sexier, I became more outgoing, louder, perhaps, quicker to smile and laugh. Yet there was also a feeling of exposure that came with wearing them. The high-waist cut amplified the curve of my hips, thighs and buttocks in what felt like a far more explicit manner. Both the vitenge and denim made me feel acutely aware of my gendered subjectivities, though in dramatically different ways- the vitenge in a demure sense, the blue jeans in an erotic way.
As Merleau-Ponty (1964) suggests, the visual look can take on the ‘palpating’ nature of the physical touch, and the quality of my interactions with some of my predominantly male participants was taking on an increasingly physical nature, teetering on the edge of friendliness and flirtation. Hugs, hands on my arms and the small of my back, lingering just a second too long. I began receiving compliments about how I looked “beautiful” or “sexy” from men, as well as the occasional marriage proposal (it was never easy to know if this was said as a joke or not). Despite the discomfort this brought me, it was also granting new levels of access into their worlds, both the physical and social.
I grappled with the ethics of the messy entanglement desire and attraction in research. I did not know (and still do not) whether flirtatiousness was intentional or perceived, a shameless manipulation or a clever leveraging of my physical subjectivities and the desires of my participants. Anthropologist Jean Gearing, who married one of her key informants, reminds us “…if we are serious about examining ourselves as researchers, we must grapple with the impact of our sexuality on our fieldwork’ (1995: 188). The accentuating of my curves, the addition of mascara and blush, and the added attention to the cleanliness and quality of my clothing seemed to signal an openness on my part to a new dimension of interaction with my male participants that went beyond the formal researcher-participant relationship.
The haptic experiences of being measured, dressed, and seen illuminate the Merleau-Pontian understanding that the body is not merely a passive object but an important site of knowledge production. My bodily encounters with the tailor, fabrics and fits, and gendered expectations demonstrate how research is conducted not just through observation or conversation, but through intimate encounters with the most basic of human capacities- breathing and being breathed upon, seeing and being seen, touching and being touched. Such embodied moments are a reminder of how an embodied presence both enables and complicates the research encounter.
Concluding thoughts
Throughout this article, I critically recount the phenomenology of ‘dressing Congolese’, and the haptic, lived, and embodied aspects of fashion and how it shapes my experience and manner of being-in-the-world as a researcher. Applying Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1956, 1981) phenomenology, dress is framed as an embodied experience. Clothing and accessories are not just passive objects but agentic in shaping my embodied experience in the field, mediating engagement with participants and the environment. The processes of sourcing, trying on, and wearing Congolese-inspired dress enabled deeper rapport with many of my participants, but also revealed unstable negotiations of authenticity, power, and embodiment that shaped my being in the field. Just as visiting the tailor and having my hair washed at the kinyozi enabled my body to be touched by my participants, feeling the fabric on my skin and the way it mediated the movement of my body was to feel my own body become the subject of analysis; and posing in new outfits, modelling gifted vitenge outfits on Sundays, or engaging in a hyper-feminine persona in blue jeans was to enact a performativity through which I was simultaneously observer and observed.
To Merleau-Ponty, bodies are temporal and spatial beings (Entwistle 2000, 334), and this significance of time and space is evident in how particular items of dress, particularly vitenge and blue jeans, linked me to specific communities—such as the Congolese in Nairobi—as well as to my own body. My relationship with both clothing and my body was not static nor consistent, but shifted along changing landscapes of time and place: the market, the church, the café, my home. In embracing the collective fiction at the clothing market, the way I felt in my body and in my clothes, and the way I was seen—by myself and others—was transformed. The market, a place of assemblages, offered a space where epistemological notions, particularly around ‘authenticity’ and ‘appropriation,’ were deconstructed in the second-hand clothing stalls filled with people and things lacking clear provenance.
Epistemologically, the intimate exchanges that fashion demands—from close physical encounters during tailoring and aesthetic practices to the way certain articles draw the eye to the body—hinder a detached mode of research. Traditional boundaries between researcher and participant became blurred, revealing the deeply embodied and relational nature of research. It is worth reiterating the proactive role my participants had in facilitating my embodied changes and the resulting positive impact on rapport-building. Despite not speaking their mother tongues, fashion became its own shared language and an important basis for building and maintaining rich interpersonal connections and embodied understanding.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Leverhulme Trust.
