Why did the Clarks Wallabee become the shoe of modern music?

The fact is though, during those halcyon days, I never thought Clarks would be a shop I would return to out of stylistic endeavour. Back then, it solved a simple albeit exciting purpose of buying my school shoes and to my innocent mind, any future purchases would follow on that lineage.

But as I got older, and realised my love for music, my view of this otherwise reliable staple changed. Because while I flicked through various, conflicting sections of the crates at my local record store, the distinctive moccasin grasshopper rim of the Clark shoe kept glancing at me.

The blurry silhouette of Richard Ashcroft on The Verve’s seminal 1997 record Urban Hymns. Rested up against a New York handrail, on the feet of Slick Rick. Then as I averted my gaze to the myriad of Britpop posters, clad along the wall it continued until I saw him there, in centre frame. Liam Gallagher, striding down the vibrant streets of 1990s Britain, with an olive green bucket hat on and a pair of tan Clarks Wallabees. These were just three corners of the musical eco-system where my humble school shoe silhouette had been found, and I felt overcome with a confusing, yet warm sense of intrigue. 

But I hadn’t quite figured out that this iconic shoe has been laced into culture for far longer than I had realised. In fact, they predate my schoolground stopping by at least thirty years, having been introduced to the cultural fabric in 1967. While they were initially designed with no nonsense durability in mind, it didn’t take long for them to infiltrate culture.

It was that very subliminal association I make with the shoe, being a staple of British tradition, that ultimately made it what it is today. It first emerged in Jamaica, during the 1920,s when early shipments of British-made fashion began trickling into its department stores. Initially, it was a shoe of purpose but nevertheless a premium one, and so their unaffordability fostered a sense of aspiration. 

Fast forward three decades, when a wealth of creativity entered the shores of Britain during the Windrush era, the Caribbean communities adopted the shoe as a symbol of subcultural revolution, reclaiming the narrative of aspiration that exists around the shoe and turning it into something more vibrant. And before you know it, this unassuming and bizarre style of shoe, once designed as a means of straight-laced stability, soon becomes the image associated with a booming culture of reggae and dancehall in the United Kingdom.

“In the ’70s and ’80s, reggae and dancehall artists wore Clarks as a way to express individuality, the way you styled them said something about who you were. That authenticity has carried through to today, and the shoes still resonate.” famed fashion designer Nicholas Daley said. “I’ve worked with some amazing Jamaican artists like Protoje, Chronixx, Don Letts and Zion Marley, and Clarks remains such a key part of their wardrobes. It’s more than footwear, it’s cultural identity.”

As the joy of these booming subcultures, released with every stamp of the foot, it spread globally and by the 1980s, the streets of New York were rampant with hip-hop artists wearing shoes designed in the green fields of Somerset.

Because when Jamaican communities began emigrating to New York, they took the Wallabee with them. These pioneers of rap, sharply in tune with anything remotely innovative, saw the stylised nature of this obscure new shoe and used it to platform an entire generation of new music. Wu-Tang Clan, Run DMC and later MF Doom were regularly seen wearing the Wallabee, continuing its legacy in the space of musical innovation. 

Visually, it represented something in between rebellion and class, making it the perfect fit for music fans who took pride in their image, yet felt disillusioned with whatever traditional outlooks that may come from. So when Britain found itself in the crosshairs of cultural change in the 1990s, it could only step forward into the future in one shoe: the Wallabee.

Traditional rock and roll in the late 1980s was giving way to acid-house, which would eventually bleed into Britpop. The lines between genres were suddenly blurring, and everything was being drenched in colour. The kaleidoscopic joy of reggae and dancehall communities gone by, no longer felt so far away, and so the shoe that once belonged to them could be shared with bold new titans of rock. 

So it felt like the perfect shoe for striding, Richard Ashcroft, in the video for ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’. As he straddled the line of confidence and despondency, trying to make sense of the capitalist loophole British society finds itself, largely at the mercy of its longstanding class structures, is there genuinely a more fitting shoe to do that in, one that struggling subcultures have co-opted, as a means to social mobilisation?

Just why its presence is so deeply felt in music is because of the art’s transient nature. Music forever in the changing tides of culture, weaving together history and future in one fell swoop, and ultimately, the Clarks Wallabee, in some weird twist of fate, is the shoe chosen to represent that. Be it marrying the Atlantic communities of Britain and Jamaica, rebelling against the common sneaker in hip-hop laden New York, or to add a sprinkling of casual sophistication to the messy joy of Britpop, it has consistently symbolised unlikely but innovative collaborations.

So, I guess I could wax lyrical all day about the shoe’s dichotomy between tradition and rebellion, past and present, sophistication and chaos. But rather than take my word for it, I’ll leave you with the immortal words of Liam Gallagher, who quite simply said, “Clarks is a sophisticated shoe. It’s like an old Bentley or an old Rolls Royce and it’s a classic. It’s been there for a long time and it doesn’t fuck about.”

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