Conference Paper: Fashion, Consumption and Cultural Exchange

Paper delivered at the AAANZ Conference Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, 3-6 December, 2019 at The University of Auckland.

The Clarks Originals ‘Remixed’ campaign, 2012: a collaboration with Trojan records to celebrate 50 years of Jamaican independence and in response to the Jamaican appropriation of Clarks Originals shoes.

Abstract:

“Everybody haffi ask weh mi get mi Clarks” - Fashion, Consumption and Cultural Exchange

In 2010, the Jamaican dancehall deejay Vybz Kartel made headlines in the UK with the release of his song ‘Clarks’. To the surprise of most of the British public and many within the company itself the song represented the latest chapter of a history spanning over 60 years of Clarks shoes in Jamaica.  The Somerset company, often thought of as ‘quintessentially British’ and associated in the UK with school shoes and the ‘preserve of middle England’ (Newman, 2012, 11), perhaps seems an unlikely brand to achieve cult status in the Caribbean. Yet despite their rural English origins, in Jamaica, Clarks Originals styles such as the Desert Boot, Desert Trek and Wallabee are considered authentically Jamaican. Using ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Clarks Headquarters in 2012 this paper investigates the ways Clarks responded to the Jamaican appropriation of these styles through collaborative projects that ‘hybridised’ and ‘remixed' these important cultural signifiers. In doing so, it considers but moves past debates around cultural appropriation to advance an understanding of cultural exchange in fashion and consumer culture.