One night, in the winter of 2017, a young Afghan man named Zaman arrived at a reception center for migrants near the Porte de la Chapelle, on the outskirts of Paris, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. Despite the cold weather, he was wearing Bermuda shorts and flip-flops. Zaman had travelled on foot and by bus from Kabul, more than four thousand miles away, to Paris, a gruelling journey that lasted sixteen months. He had lost most of his belongings along the way. In particular, he now needed new shoes. He made his way through the center, searching for a space that the volunteers had termed “the store”: a cavernous room packed with metal shelving and buckets full of donated clothes, where refugees could select new trousers, sweaters, and winter jackets. Staring at a jumble of sneakers packed in clear plastic containers, Zaman addressed a volunteer named Valerie Larrondot. Did the pile contain any “sneakers that weren’t ugly or dirty?” he asked, in French. “Sneakers like Jay-Z’s?”

This exchange was the starting point for “Sneakers Like Jay-Z,” a collaborative project that explores the meaning of clothing for newly arrived refugees. Larrondot recruited two French photographers, Ambroise Tézenas and Frédéric Delangle, to take portraits of young men wearing outfits that they’d selected at the store, which are presented along with interviews with the men, conducted by center volunteers, about the items they’d selected. The resulting series pairs pictures and interviews to create a portrait of how refugees see themselves, and how they wish to be seen.

Many of the subjects arrived in France with few personal possessions, after surviving dangerous journeys; some had only the clothes on their backs. Putting effort into their appearances, they said in the interviews, is a way to telegraph a sense of well-being to people they meet in France and to their loved ones back home. “If my friends saw me here, they’d say I’d taken back up my habit of dressing well, and they would be reassured,” Idriss, a twenty-year-old from Côte d’Ivoire, said. Amid the tumult of being in a new country, in a shelter, with no idea what the future would bring, a fresh outfit helped these men both to maintain ties to their home countries and to signal a fresh start. “Changing clothes, it’s like changing your life,” Ali, from Afghanistan, said. “You resemble a completely different person. You transform yourself.” Referring to the multi-pocketed jacket he’d chosen, Abdallah, a twenty-four-year-old Sudanese man, said, “I look more French with it, don’t I?”