The new Guinness ad featuring superbly dressed Congolese men has been getting a lot of attention since its release earlier this week, writes Tanvi Misra. But how closely do the sashaying and stout-swigging characters in the ad match reality?
The ad follows the men as they shed their working clothes and transform themselves into polished, hat-wearing, cane-wielding style moguls – because, as the narrator says, “in life, you cannot always choose what you do, but you can always choose who you are.”
Costume designer Mr Gammon took 28 suitcases of elegant kit to the shoot with members of the Congolese Society of Ambianceurs and Elegant Persons (SAPE) – sapeurs, as they are known. The main idea was to be true to the sapeur look, but also, “kind of, heighten it a bit,” Gammon says. “I wasn’t redesigning them.”
Photographer Per-Anders Pettersson who spent five days with sapeurs in Kinshasa in 2012 says the picture portrayed in the ad is pretty accurate.
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