The story begins with something remarkably simple: leftover sheepskin.
In 1825, brothers Cyrus and James Clark were working in Street, Somerset, when James began turning sheepskin offcuts from his brother’s tannery into slippers. The Brown Petersburgh became the first Clarks product and the starting point for a business that would eventually grow far beyond rural England.
Over the following century, Clarks became an important British shoemaker, developing new approaches to comfort, fit and manufacturing. The Clark family’s Quaker values also meant the company’s influence extended into the community around it. In Street, the family supported education, workers’ welfare and housing, while members of the wider Clark family became associated with progressive social causes, including women’s suffrage.
Yet one of the most interesting parts of the Clarks story is something the family could never have completely planned: what happened when other cultures discovered its shoes.
In 1950, Nathan Clark introduced the Desert Boot, inspired by the simple suede boots he had encountered while serving in Burma during the Second World War. With its uncomplicated suede upper and crepe sole, the Desert Boot offered a relaxed alternative to the formal footwear that dominated the period.
Then Jamaica discovered Clarks.
During the 1960s and 1970s, styles including the Desert Boot became associated with rude boy culture before developing an extraordinary relationship with reggae and, later, dancehall. What had begun as an understated British shoe became a marker of style and status thousands of miles away from Somerset.
The relationship became so deep that Clarks eventually became part of the language of Jamaican popular culture itself, repeatedly referenced by musicians and celebrated in songs. Few British footwear companies have achieved that kind of organic cultural adoption.
And then came the Wallabee.
Introduced in 1968, the Wallabee combined moccasin-inspired construction with a distinctive foot-shaped silhouette and natural crepe sole. It was simple, comfortable and almost completely removed from the conventional idea of a fashionable shoe.
That simplicity proved to be its strength.
As Jamaican communities established themselves in New York, an appreciation for Clarks travelled with them. The Wallabee gradually entered the city’s emerging street culture before becoming particularly significant within hip-hop.
By the 1990s, Wu-Tang Clan had helped push the shoe into another cultural universe. Ghostface Killah and Raekwon became particularly associated with Wallabees, helping transform a shoe connected to a 200-year-old Somerset company into an unlikely piece of New York rap history.
Back in Britain, Clarks was simultaneously finding new meanings.
The Wallabee became connected with the collision of music, football and style surrounding Manchester during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Indie, dance and terrace influences increasingly crossed over, while Clarks’ understated footwear fitted naturally into a distinctly British approach to dressing that often valued authenticity over obvious luxury.
Britpop brought another generation. Football culture brought another. Hip-hop, streetwear and fashion would continue bringing new audiences.
This ability to move between cultures is perhaps what makes the Clarks story so unusual.
The Desert Boot and Wallabee were never covered in enormous logos or designed around rapidly changing trends. Their relative simplicity allowed different communities to interpret them differently. A Wallabee in Somerset, Kingston, Manchester or New York could essentially be the same shoe while carrying completely different cultural meaning.
Clarks itself changed considerably along the way. The company expanded internationally and, as the economics of footwear manufacturing changed, much of its mass production moved overseas from the 1990s onwards.
But manufacturing location alone doesn’t explain cultural identity.
Across two centuries, Clarks says it has created more than 22,000 different styles, yet arguably its greatest achievement cannot be measured by the number of shoes it produced.
It is the fact that generations of people continually decided that certain Clarks shoes belonged to them.
Jamaican rude boys, reggae and dancehall artists, New York rappers, Manchester musicians, football crowds and ordinary wearers repeatedly took understated footwear originally created by a Somerset shoemaker and gave it meanings nobody sitting in the company’s offices could ever have manufactured.
That is the difference between producing a successful product and becoming part of culture.
From Somerset to Jamaica, Manchester and New York, Clarks didn’t simply travel the world. The world continually reinvented Clarks.
