The Clarks Desert Boot Came Home From the War in a Sketchbook

In 1949 a man from a Somerset shoe family set up at the Chicago Shoe Fair with a boot his own company had not wanted to make. It was ankle high, cut from soft suede, laced through a few pairs of eyelets and set on a thick, pale sole of crepe rubber. Nathan Clark showed it to Oscar Schoeffler, the fashion editor of Esquire. The magazine ran a feature, American orders followed, and the Clarks Desert Boot had found its first real market.

The boot had taken the long way to Chicago. It started in a war, passed through a bazaar in Cairo and sat for a while on a shelf in Street, Somerset, where almost nobody at the company thought it would sell.

A shoe family goes to war

Clarks began in Street in 1825, when Cyrus Clark started making rugs from sheepskins. His brother James joined him, the business became C. & J. Clark, and it soon added slippers made from the same skins. More than a century later it was still a family business, with Nathan's brother Bancroft eventually at the head of it.

Nathan Clark was a great-grandson of James. He was posted to Burma in 1941, and the family had asked him to keep an eye out for footwear ideas while he was abroad. Accounts of his service do not agree on the details. Several style histories place him with the Eighth Army, Wikipedia's company history names the Royal Army Service Corps, and other accounts mention a West African brigade. What they agree on is what he saw, which was officers wearing sand colored suede ankle boots with crepe soles during their downtime.

The Cairo connection

Those boots were not army issue. The story Clarks tells is that they were made to order by cobblers in Khan el-Khalili, the old bazaar in Cairo, for officers of the British Eighth Army whose standard boots were doing badly on desert ground. Some versions say South African soldiers commissioned the first pairs. Others say officers simply had their chukka boots copied in the bazaar.

Either way, the design pulled together two older shoes. One was the chukka, the short lace up boot associated with polo and with British officers in India. The other was the veldskoen, a rough field shoe worn in South Africa. The Cairo version kept the low ankle and the open lacing but sat on crepe rubber instead of leather, which made it light and grippy on loose ground.

A company that said no

Clark sent sketches home to Bancroft, who by then was running the company. One account says he cut his first patterns out of newspaper in his tent. Back in Street the idea went nowhere. Suede uppers and crepe soles read as working class at the time, and the company's Stock Committee did not believe a shoe like that would sell. A first sample was made in 1946, and the reaction was lukewarm.

So Clark kept going without them. He made samples himself and named the shoe after the desert campaign that had inspired it. In 1948 he founded Clarks Australia and began selling it there. Then came Chicago, and the Esquire coverage that turned a family argument into an export business.

The dates here are slightly blurry. Most accounts put the Chicago showing in 1949 and the official launch in 1950, the year Clarks began advertising the boot. A few retell it as a single 1950 debut. Our reading is that the boot was seen in 1949 and sold from 1950, and the Wikipedia entry on the desert boot gives the 1949 fair.

Crepe, suede and not much else

Part of the appeal is how little there is to it. A soft suede upper, a short run of laces and that sole. Crepe rubber is natural latex coagulated with acid and pressed through rollers until it forms crinkled sheets, which is where the slightly wrinkled, gum colored look comes from. It is bouncier than ordinary rubber and grips well.

It also has flaws. Crepe varies more in quality than standard rubber, and the same softness that makes it comfortable means it wears faster. None of this has hurt the boot, partly because a scuffed pair looks better than a clean one. That is the same logic behind a faded chore coat or a pair of broken in selvedge jeans.

Through the 1950s the boot sold far better in North America than at home. In Britain it was first sold through shops on Regent Street in London, largely to American tourists, which says something about how little the British trade thought of it.

Mods, beats and rude boys

Then the young adopted it. In America the beats and jazz crowd of the 1950s took to the desert boot as an alternative to polished leather. In London the mod subculture) that formed in the late 1950s made Clarks desert boots part of its uniform, alongside bowling shoes and carefully kept hair. Highsnobiety reports that many of the students on the streets of Paris in 1968 wore them as well.

In Jamaica the shoe became a fixture for the rude boys of Kingston in the 1960s, and Clarks briefly gave the local version a longer, narrower toe before going back to the original shape. That Jamaican attachment to Clarks is a whole story of its own.

The mod connection kept coming back. The 1979 film Quadrophenia set off a mod revival in Britain, with Paul Weller as one of its loudest champions, and the desert boot went back on young feet. Our history of the Harrington jacket covers another piece of that wardrobe, a cotton jacket the original mods had adopted too. In the 1990s the Britpop bands and their fans brought it around again, with Oasis among the names most often tied to the revival.

For more, see menswear history, heritage brands and the Quiet Menace style section. If you like a shoe with a long life in subcultures, our history of the Bass Weejuns penny loafer is a good next read.

The strangest part of the story is how close it came to not happening. The desert boot survived a war, a skeptical stock committee and a home market that sold it mostly to tourists. It made it because one man in a tent in Burma decided the boots on other men's feet were worth drawing.