Clarks, fashion and dancehall style

Jamaican music style is not decoration applied afterwards. The ska-era rude boy's narrow suit, the Rasta tam of the 1970s, the engineered spectacle of the 1990s dancehall floor and a British desert boot adopted so completely that a 2010 record moved its sales — each was a way of saying who was speaking and on whose behalf.

Dressed to be seen

A dance is a public occasion, and in Jamaica it has always been understood as one. People do not turn up to be background. What gets worn to a dance is a statement about money, allegiance and self-respect made in front of an audience that will read it accurately, and the history of Jamaican music can be followed through those statements almost as well as through its records.

The rude boy's suit

In the ska and rocksteady years the look was sharp and deliberately expensive: a narrow suit, a thin tie, a stingy-brim hat, shoes polished to a standard. The rude boy of the mid-1960s was a young man with limited prospects dressing better than his circumstances, and the records of the period argue about him directly — Prince Buster's "Judge Dread" sequence puts him on trial and hands down absurd sentences.

The style exported intact. British mods took it up in the 1960s; skinheads adopted a version of it before the label acquired its later associations; and the two-tone revival of the late 1970s put it back on television with the Specials and Madness dressed as a memory of Kingston in 1966. A working-class Jamaican teenager's tailoring became one of British youth culture's standing reference points.

Refusal and the tam

Roots reggae in the 1970s dressed against all of that. Locks, the knitted tam, red gold and green, army surplus and deliberately plain clothing amounted to a refusal of the aspirational suit — a statement that respectability was not the goal and that the wearer's allegiance lay elsewhere. It was as considered a look as the one it replaced, and it carried a good deal more risk at the time.

Nobody comes to a dance to be background. The clothes are part of the argument.

The dancehall floor

From the late 1980s the dancehall reversed the refusal and went spectacular. Crews dressed as units in colour-coordinated outfits made specifically for one night, with gold, mesh, sequins and elaborate hair, and the whole thing was built to be looked at — first by the room and then by the video light, whose operators turned dance footage into a circulating record of who had worn what.

Women drove it. Carlene Smith's crowning as Dancehall Queen in the 1990s made the dancer a named public figure with commercial value, and the crews around her established that the outfit was a designed object with an author. The style drew furious criticism in the Jamaican press for indecency, which is roughly what the rude boy's suit had drawn thirty years earlier, from the same quarters.

A shoe from Somerset

Clarks is an English firm, and its desert boot and Wallabee have been Jamaican staples since the 1960s, adopted first by rude boys and then by every subsequent generation of the dance. Al Fingers's book Clarks in Jamaica, published in 2012, traced the relationship in detail: a mass-market British shoe acquiring, several thousand miles away, a set of meanings its manufacturer had nothing to do with.

In 2010 the record "Clarks", by Vybz Kartel with Popcaan and Gaza Slim, made the connection explicit and moved the market. The sales effect in Jamaica and among Jamaican communities abroad was reported widely enough that the company itself acknowledged it. A dancehall lyric functioned as the most effective advertising a 185-year-old shoemaker had that year, and it was not commissioned.

That is the pattern worth keeping. Jamaican style has repeatedly taken something ordinary and foreign — a British shoe, a suit cut, a surplus jacket — and given it a meaning that then travels back out with the music attached. Reading the clothes as decoration misses that they are frequently the argument itself, made by people whose other means of being heard were limited.