Confirming class stereotypes or turning them inside out? In the first in a series that lifts the lid on current trends, Alex Ogden searches for the meaning of ‘chav’.
Chav: to some, it’s an innocuous label given to misbehaving youths, decked out in imitation designer garms, fitted baseball caps and lashings of bling. To others, it’s a vile and abusive word used to discriminate against the working class. Whatever your stance, however, it’s fair to say that ‘chav’ is at the heart of the British fixation with social rank.
Recently, the pejorative slur started a new life outside the pages of the Sun and the Daily Mail. This year ‘chav’ has been hashtagged on the Tumblr blogs of influential designers, used as casually as any other adjective in respectable fashion articles, and listed as a desirable quality in modelling agency casting calls. ‘The “chav” aesthetic’ is moving away from its alleged council estate roots, to catwalks and designer clothing collections.
It’s no surprise that East London is currently at the centre of an increasingly popular ‘chav’ trend. But does this really amount to the progressive re-appropriation of clothing and accessories previously torn apart by mainstream media? Or is it plain old pandering to tired stereotypes and caricatures of the working class?
One of the most obvious instances of ‘chav’ infiltrating popular East London style and culture, is in the video for rap group Serious Thugs’ recent musical offering, ‘Ur Not a Baller’. Comprised of noted fashion photographer and designer Alis Pelleschi, rapper Yung Williminati, and DJ Warlock, Serious Thugs boast an impressive following, both on and offline. In the ‘Ur Not a Baller’ video – labelled on the group’s own Tumblr blog as ‘#chav’ – Serious Thugs paint an unsettling picture of council estate life: bubble coats and Burberry bikinis, the Nike logo stencilled onto an unbranded trainer shoe, and wads of money juxtaposed with dated mobile phones.
Pelleschi and Co. come across as adding fuel to the media’s harmful fantasies about working class urban areas; cementing and fetishising the chav stereotype. It’s difficult to tell whether Serious Thugs’ portrayal of the ‘chav’ should be celebrated for attempting to make fashionable a frequently ridiculed style, or if the band should be reprimanded for making a spectacle of the lower classes; wearing an element of class identity like an outlandish fancy dress costume.
Also contributing to chav’s fashion uprising is milliner and clothing designer Nasir Mazhar. Born in East London, Mazhar gained critical acclaim for his idiosyncratic headwear and urban, ambi-sexual fashion collections. Though the designer has never publically referred to his designs as ‘chavvy’, that’s how his work has been classified by the fashion commentariat.
Mazhar’s low slung joggers revealing branded boxer shorts would fit into a marginalising comedy sketch as easily as the catwalk; and photos of his brash bomber jackets could illustrate both a fashion article and a tabloid piece on ‘super scroungers’.
For a designer whose concepts are so obviously based upon an urban, working class aesthetic, it’s notable that the average Nasir Mazhar piece retails at around £200. It’d be easy to assume that the kind of person willing to spend £200 – around a month’s unemployment benefits – would also be a kind of person cripplingly unfamiliar with a council estate, but perhaps that’s an unwarranted assumption on a par with the idea that the ‘chav’ lives on a council estate with no money.
But it may be that Nasir Mazhar’s designs really are more re-invention than re-hashed stereotype. In his latest collection, Mazhar builds on clothing heavily embedded in the chav stereotype, putting a modish new spin on shell suits and adding a sleek silhouette to the backwards cap. Rihanna’s River Island collection is a pale imitation of Mazhar’s successful chav/chic hybrid. This designer is making ‘chav’ so socially acceptable, even the uber famous are taking note.
Since fashion choices are a form of personal expression, some may simply say that people are entitled to dress however they like, in whatever way feels comfortable. But I think it unfair for class appropriation to be swept under the rug, dismissed as a sartorial choice with no social consequences.
It comes to this: should the middle and upper classes go unchallenged when they emulate a style closely linked to a demonised working class? Is it moral to capitalise on a style deep-rooted in those with little money? Is the adoption of chav style ‘only fashion’? Does it mean anything more – or nothing at all?
The prominence of ‘chav’ raises a number of questions with difficult and ambiguous answers. My hope is that the visibility of ‘chav’ will start a dialogue on class which prompts people to challenge discriminatory stereotypes and rethink their class based assumptions.