Corruption Couture: Can Dirty Money Make Clean Outfits?

Corruption couture is in vogue. It is WAY uglier and more visible than ever. Corrupt officials not only destroy your pockets, they relish in the ability to subject your eyes to egregiously ugly fashion. GET A STYLIST PLEASE. The ability to be publicly unattractive in your fashions, even absurdly so, in a country that polices beauty and appearance more harshly than almost any other, reveals the profound power of money: its ability to shift the collective gaze and to coerce perception itself.

After hemorrhaging the country’s resources and feasting on our taxes, they’ve decided to offer us a few crumbs from their Hermes cakes — the very ones we funded. Their act of 'generosity'? Lifting the veil, opening the front-row seats of their excess through Instagram stories, luxury bag hauls, and Dubai getaways that outnumber your trips to the spaza. Corruption has become an aesthetic; poorly curated, filtered, and flaunted.

Mobutu Sese Seko

Flaunting corruption couture did not start in 2025. “Corruption couture” finds one of its most striking embodiments in the reigns of Jean-Claude and Michèle Duvalier in Haiti and Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (now the DRC). Both regimes fused political excess with cotton-eating, satin-drowning, gold-stuffed fashion. Kore, by default Black people are maximalist, now imagine that with the mix of stolen money...

Michèle Duvalier and Her Husband

Michèle Duvalier (Haiti's former first lady), known for her gluttonous Parisian shopping sprees and ardour for haute couture, reportedly spent millions on designer gowns and jewellery while Haiti’s public hospitals lacked basic supplies.

Likewise, Mobutu Sese Seko cultivated his own extravagant aesthetic as symbols of his stature and power. This is fashion as theatre my dolls! Clothing, in the context of Duvalier and Sese Seko, launders more than just dirty reputations; it launders history itself. The beauty of the fabric distracts from the ugliness of exploitation, and the designer tag becomes a moral detergent. Their outfits were so clean that their fashion almost clouds people from understanding the dirty money that went into curating these wardrobes.

Luxury Haul

However, a lot has changed about the spectacle of corruption couture from Mobutu and Duvalier's time. In 2025, citizens have way more access to their politicians through social media and the 'baddies' that are funded by tax money. Before, these images were exclusively published through paparazzi, news outlets, professional photographers etc. Corrupt people hid behind their soldiers and tall walls. Now, they have the nerve to buy 10 luxury bags in a week and 'VLOG' the trip for us.

Moreover, the clothes themselves are not as aesthetically pleasing. They just buy anything sana, it does not look styled nor curated... just thrown on. To have the audacity not only to misappropriate public funds but also to flaunt that wealth so brazenly—and then to dress poorly while doing so (ESPECIALLY IN A COUNTRY KNOWN FOR FASHIONNNNN)—is completely unforgivable. To flaunt that money stolen from others' indentured labour and then uphinde unganxibi kakhle? Ngeke khehla :(

It is even more comical when people who are victims of corruption berate people who criticise corruption couture. This cowardly belief that moneyed people cannot be challenged is perfectly embodied by one of the most common kasi phrases ethi "imali iyakugeza". This means 'money bathes you'. It is a phrase used mostly when we're talking about people who become 'beautiful' after getting money. Even though this is more idiomatic or figurative, the synonymity between money, cleanliness and beauty in the phrase shows that people do tie money to inherent beauty. Moreover, beauty is often tied to cleanliness and morality -- which is why a lot of people find it hard to even question the dirtiness of the money that has 'cleansed' people's images. To them it is a performance of exorbitant amounts of money, therefore it is clean, it is unquestionably beautiful.

It’s the same way baddies will gladly date an aesthetically displeasing rich khehla. Money makes him beautiful enough to ignore his blemishes. Perhaps vele imali iyakugeza.