Mambo Italiano: Italian Surfing Subcultures and Representations of Australian Cultural Identity

The paper aims to explore the ways an all-Australian surf lifestyle brand, Mambo, conveys the images and the representations of Australian-ness among two Italian surfing communities, based in Northern and Central Italy. Essentially, Mambo is a Sydney based surf-wear label that specializes in bright t-shirts. Created in 1984, in less than a decade the label was generating an annual turnover of more than $10 million. While a Mambo montage might feature the conventional signifiers of Australian culture – like the beach, thongs, sprinklers, and Holdens – it is almost invariably underlined with a sharp satirical bite. The Mambo designers are generally obsessed with something that derives from, or connects with, the Australian experience. Also, Mambo has taken Australia’s blunt approach to life and glorified it, in pure surfing subculture style. The paper tries to understand how and how much the different signifiers of Australian cultural identity conveyed by Mambo products are received by Italian surfers/consumers, also trying to explore how the Italian surfing subcultures make sense of these ironical markers of Australian-ness.