Archival Consumed: Chavs

In Elizabethan England, there were sumptuary laws to prevent members of the rabble from dressing above their station. This was never really effective, but to understand how truly futile it is these days for the upper classes to try keeping the masses in their sartorial place, you need to know what a chav is. ”Chav” — the champion buzzword of 2004 in Britain, according to one language maven there — refers to something between a subculture and a social class. Experts disagree about the slang term’s origins, but the unofficial definition sounds rather condescending or even cruel: a clueless suburbanite with appalling taste and a tendency toward track suits and loud jewelry. Still, as with ”redneck” in America, a term that is imposed as a marker of scorn can be embraced as a marker of pride; at the very least, a certain humor and irony lace many of the discussions about chavs on Web sites and in books like ”Chav! A User’s Guide to Britain’s New Ruling Class.”

In any case, there’s one aspect of chavness that almost every description mentions right away: Chavs love Burberry. The recognizable plaid pattern that Burberry, the venerable English luxury brand, used to tuck away as the discreet lining of its famous raincoats has long since broken free to serve as a status signifier. Presumably it is status that chavs are looking for when they snap up anything and everything emblazoned with the plaid. The most popular element of the chav uniform is the Burberry plaid cap.

Of course, when a huge and decidedly not upper-crust class embraces such a signifier, its meaning is completely altered. In Britain, business-school professors and marketing professionals have debated the tarnishing of Burberry exclusivity. ”The amusing thing and the entertaining thing for many people is that because chavs are new money, they’re kind of faintly ridiculous, spending their money on tawdry baubles,” observes Lucian James of the San Francisco branding agency Agenda Inc., which has consulted for various luxury brands. James, who is English, points to David Beckham and his wife, Victoria (the former Posh Spice), as the reigning monarchs of celebrity chavdom, although when bad-taste transculturalist Britney Spears bought a Burberry-style plaid bed for her dog, the British tabloid press took note.

Sounding thoroughly unamused, Stacey Cartwright, a Burberry executive, argues that this chav business is just a trivial tabloid story. The international brand continues to thrive in chav-free North America and Asia, she says. Responding to reports that Burberry discontinued one of its plaid caps in the U.K., she says that the ”small” British market was slow anyway. ”The chav issue won’t have helped, but it’s on top of what was already quite a sluggish market,” she says. Besides, she continues, ”the caps that the so-called chavs wear are actually counterfeit products; they’re not our products.” Burberry still offers, for example, a $200 cashmere plaid cap in Britain. ”That’s out of the price range of most of these individuals,” Cartwright says.

It certainly seems that chav gear is often counterfeit, as Burberry plaid is both distinct and easy to copy. It’s the distinctness, actually, that helps make it such a ripe target for adoption by someone other than the classic swells that Burberry apparently prefers — after all, in the United States, Burberry is one of many luxury brands popular among rap artists. All of which shows how fluid brand meaning has become since the days of sumptuary laws, and how it’s ultimately consumers who decide what that meaning is.

Chavs are also reported to have a fondness for Gucci, Nokia phones and Stella Artois beer, among others. Oakley Thump sunglasses (with a built-in MP3 player) were recently named ”chaviest gadget” at an alternative tech-awards ceremony. Interestingly, James, the branding consultant, suggests that in some ways chav culture has parallels to punk culture. ”It’s the same kind of slightly disenfranchised suburban kids,” he says, but this time, instead of building a subculture around, say, anger and intoxicants, they’ve built one around consumerism. ”In the same way in the 70’s they would sort of do glue, now they’re all just sitting at McDonald’s wearing Burberry hats.” In chav culture, then, Burberry may be — to tweak the slogan that CBS Records used to sell the Clash, long ago — the only brand that matters.

[This installment of the Consumed column appeared in the January 2, 2005, New York Times Magazine; it was posted on this site some time much later, despite the fiddled-with time/date stamp.]