The most charming team outfit we’ve seen thus far at the World Cup did not derive from some Portland sportswear juggernaut with a billion-dollar ad budget.
Instead, it was the product of a self-taught 30-year-old whose brand has fewer than 10,000 Instagram followers.
Alvin Mak, a Congolese designer in Paris, is the man responsible for the leopard-embellished suits and leopard bags that the Congolese national team wore for its arrival in Houston last week.
The team, which is appearing in its first World Cup since 1974 (a less-than-providential run that most Congolese sports fans would rather wipe from memory) doesn’t play its first match until Wednesday, but it has already made quite an impression. Mak, in an interview on Monday, said he had fielded inquiries about the commanding feline suits from as far as Taiwan. Images of the team, in their beguiling suits, spread broadly online, drawing comments like “when can I purchase those bags” in multiple languages.
“It’s global right now,” said Mak, who was still catching up to all the attention. He was planning to offer the suits and bags for sale on his website this week — but only as a preorder. He hadn’t expected such an outsize response and had no stock on hand.
“I’m very honored, not just for myself, but more for my culture,” he said. On Tuesday, he will fly to Houston to watch the team play its opening match against Portugal, which is on Wednesday. It will be his first time in America.
Mak’s design draws on the Congolese culture of La Sape, or La Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, a deeply rooted tradition of raffish Congolese men dressing with zeal, pattern and personality.
“In Congo, we have three things,” Mak said. “We have music, we have fashion, and we have sport.” In his words, a sapeur is “an elegant person of Congo who wears clothes extravagantly.” With his home country’s national team returning to the world’s mightiest sporting stage after five decades, he wanted to make sure they didn’t leave behind some of that Sapeur grandeur. Indeed, the team arrived in the United States looking as if they were prepared for a royal wedding or a particularly regal hunting party. In their black ties and feline motif, they looked like a squad to be reckoned with.
“In Congo culture, the spirit of leopard is a spirit of strength,” he said. “It is the spirit of resilience, so I want to transfer this energy to them.”
Mak said he took some notes from the more traditional blue suits that the 1974 team wore (back when they were competing as Zaire), but to him, there was no way the Congo team today could not wear leopard. Arriving in Houston, each player also had a leopard brooch tacked to his suit. Mak had one pinned to his shirt during our interview.
Leopard, he said, is more than a popular pattern. “It really means something for the Congolese culture deeply,” he said. After all, the soccer team is known in Congo as Les Léopards, and leopard has been part of the visual language of Congo style since it was known as Zaire. Mobutu Sese Seko, the country’s longtime dictator, ruled in a brimless leopard-skin hat. To this day, the style is known to some as a Mobutu hat.
Born in Congo, Mak moved to Paris when he was 11. He worked as a retail employee — the extent of his formal fashion experience — before beginning to produce clothes when he was about 20. He said he learned how to design in part from watching documentaries about creative directors made by the French filmmaker Loïc Prigent on YouTube.
“I’d check different videos around the internet, like ‘What is it like to be a fashion designer?’” Mak said.
While his early forays into design were humble efforts, he always harbored an audacious streak and a belief in himself. That, perhaps, explains why he decided, in the lead-up to the World Cup, to cold-email the ministry of sports in Congo and offer his vision for the project.
He believed that his proposal was picked by the ministry in part because he valued producing the ensembles entirely in Congo. It was a large operation, requiring 55 suits and bags for the players and coaches. This was, he said, a challenging task with the players bulking up as their training progressed.
“It was a very long process,” he said. “We took every measure of every player.”
It was important to the designer that the suits were providing jobs — and hope — for the Congolese at a time when his home country is racked by war in its eastern provinces and an escalating Ebola outbreak.
“Life is very hard there, you know, people have suffered,” Mak said. He wanted to demonstrate that his country is capable of premium, must-see craft, too.
“I want to show to the world what Congolese people can do.”
