Please, Kevin, tell Sharon that only chavs wear Burberry checks
Sharon and Joseph: Chavtastic
If further proof were needed that only chavs wear Burberry’s now infamous check, here it is: Sharon and Joseph at some laqgha tal-progressivi.
Burberry’s financial fortunes declined dramatically over the last few years when its most famous pattern – the one with which the brand is closely associated – became the accessory of choice for British chavs and all its other customers fled.
It has been struggling to revive its bottom line ever since, but the damage done by the chavs with their Burbery scarves and their Burberry caps and their Burberry check bags has been incalculable.
So I guess it figures that a Burberry check scarf would feature so prominently in the Chavtastic Party.
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You are right that Burberry check became associated with chavs in the UK, but the company’s financial fortunes depended more on Japanese and American consumers and indeed their share price is at 640 today up from 240 in 2003 and almost recovered from the credit crisis lows that retail stocks suffered
What’s your vote on the etymology of ‘chav’? Cheltenham Average seems not to apply here. Does Council Housed And Violent?
Moreover, does the use of the word mean that you are a neo-snob having difficulty with social mobility and class, or is it just a bit of harmless fun?
[Daphne – Chavs are a social type. It is a word that sums up a lot, and that is why it was coined and came to be so widely used. Of course I don’t have problems with social mobility. But then neither am I going to be bullied by the PC squad into not pointing out the obvious. Sharon Ellul Bonici and Joseph and Michelle Muscat are archetypal chavs, acquiring myriad trappings but getting it ever so wrong, while displaying naked delight in having ‘arrived’ (where?). Also, when Labour officials speak about the ‘mitilkless’, what they mean is other chavs like them, or non-chavs who have adopted, like Marisa Micallef, chav values and the chav way of life.
Labour is moving from Workers’ Party to Chavtastic Party. Plenty of people move up the social ladder and acquire money and possessions without the chav attitudes and behaviour. Identifying the chav profile is not a matter of snobbery but of marketing. Labour is marketing itself to chavs, even though it might not be aware of this, and consequently, it is attracting them. Let’s put it this way: the party leader is a classic poster-boy for chavs.]
Your explanation makes a lot of sense. I thought you were throwing insults rather than sticking to exposing bad actions and policies. It indeed shows a lot about a person if they feel the need to show off their influence and power through showy possessions, even if the choice of possession is rather naff.
Would the term ‘yuppy’ apply too?
[Daphne – No, those don’t exist anymore. Besides, chavs are different.]
This is nothing compared to Marlene Mizzi’s array of Burberry stuff, including skirt – now that would be a good photo.
Frankly, I don’t think she’d give a chav’s worth to your advice, especially since she has a good recollection of your working class dad.
[Daphne – My father is far from working-class, Kev. He comes from one of Valletta’s oldest and most respected families, and by Valletta I don’t mean the Arcipierku. It is precisely because your wife is a chav that she doesn’t know this (if she came from my background she would know exactly where I come from), highlighting precisely the point I made earlier: that chavs think social class and status are defined by trappings and obvious possessions. They’re not. Even if I went to live in a maisonette in Fgura with nothing to my name I would still be who I am. And your wife, despite the job and the Brussels flat and the Big BMW Off-Roader and the Facebook photos ‘having a life’, is still a common chav and will be so until the die she dies. Nothing she buys or posts on Facebook is ever going to change that. It must be so very frustrating to know that this is one of the few things that money can’t buy.]
I say again: deleting the last part of my comment has changed the context of ‘working class’ – now are you going to at least put this up or are you going to act like a chav?
[Daphne – Kev, read my lips: I deleted the last part of your comment so as not to cause you further embarrassment with what my reply would have been. Your wife comes from the sort of background where she is afraid of doing certain things – ironically – because she thinks they might identify her for what she is. She doesn’t understand that people from my social background and that of my parents have no similar insecurities or fears, because whatever they do or don’t do, the facts of where they come from remain exactly what they are (as indeed is the case with people like your wife, no matter how hard they try).
The bottom line is that despite not being a chav yourself, you went and married one. Now bloody well deal with it, instead of trying to justify your decision. Sharon DOES care what I think. I know because somebody’s sent me whole conversations about me from her Facebook wall, which is riddled – surprise – with friends who are chavs. One of them is so very chavvy that the advice she gave your wife was ‘U ejja, let her burn in her own oil.’ She would have been better off putting it down in Maltese.
Why Sharon and the rest of the chavs on her wall insist on engaging each other in a language they can barely speak is beyond me. Apparently, chavs think that speaking English is another status ‘simbill’. Well, here’s one for you, Kev: my family speaks Maltese, not English. All the smart Valletta families did and still do, except that it’s a very different sort of Maltese to the one Sharon grew up with. Now run off and clean out your gerbil’s cage with that ruddy scarf.]
Your world of chavs and snot-whats is not completely alien to me, Daphne, even if yours is irrevocably twisted. Let me speak to you in school-time terms, since that’s where you’ve anchored your ‘world’ view. Here’s a little story.
Once, in my primary school days, the nuns decreed – out of the blue – that the Maltese language should not be spoken on the school premises. A few of us rebelled. We are Maltese, surely this cannot be right! Eventually, there emerged three tribes: the Maltese speakers, the tal-Pepe and ‘the traitors’. The ‘traitors’, of course, were the Maltese speakers who obeyed and switched to English. So they were ostracised.
We felt less anger towards the tal-Pepe minority – after all, they were the imsieken who spoke garbled Maltese and yet could not speak proper English either. To us, the tal-Pepe crowd were a sad looking lot – usually dark-skinned with pale fungus patches on their faces (no ‘Head & Shoulders’ then, I guess).
Eventually, the nuns gave up, the division between the Maltese speakers dissipated and the tal-Pepe kids retained their tiny minority corner, singing away in ‘Englese’ with that characteristically lilting Maltese tone which makes English sound like its coming from one’s butt.
[Daphne – I’ve deleted your last sentence, kev, but don’t challenge me about it because you’re trying my patience now. I think the basis of all these chips displayed above is your genesis from a family of ‘dekaduti’. Too bad – it’s all swings and roundabouts so live with it. This place and others are full of robber barons whose family’s destiny has taken the reverse trajectory. I never had you down as somebody who dislikes dark skin (so it’s sad to be dark-skinned, is it?). Also, you’ve clearly never had dandruff because that’s what Head & Shoulders was for – and yes, it was sold here when you were a child. Fungus patches are treated with something else.]
Oh, I’m trying your patience, now am I? Ghandek xorti rrispondejtek, hallik minn trying your patience – especially considering the deletions of perfectly fair comments.
You do make my day, Daphne. Your blog is very addictive. You are so witty. You are spot on about the tacky scarf. I can’t imagine a British politician wearing such a huge Burberry scarf.
At the end of the day breeding will out Kev. But then Sharon wouldn’t know what that’s all about, would she?
X`hemm hazin li tkun mill-Arcipierku?
@N.L. Kienet fuq il-ponta ta’ lsieni imma ilhaqt staqsejtha inti qabli. Grazzi
And then you (and your stablemate Fr Joe (Beirut) Borg) wonder why the rest of the media won’t have anything to do with yopu.
It’s cos you make it blindingly obvious that you are not motivated by any public spirit, but by pure angst and personal animosity.
[Daphne – On the contrary, it is because I am NOT motivated by that spirit that I didn’t put up a series of blog-posts detailing how the magistrate and the politician were cheating with each other on their spouses, or how the magistrate presided over her lover’s brother’s criminal case because she thought that no one knew and that she could get away with it. I had a blog already two years ago, remember. If my motivation were personal and I were that sort, I could have rung her – I have her mobile telephone number – and told her: ‘Listen, Cons’ – because we are on first name terms – ‘if you don’t make case X go my way, you’re going to wake up tomorrow to find your secret affair with Robert uploaded on my blog.’ For all we know, there might be other people who did just that, though threatening to call his wife or her husband, rather than uploading on a blog. The point is that she was exposed to it and that we will never know.]
Can I quote Cambridge then?
/tʃæv/ n [C] UK slang
a young, often uneducated person who dresses in a particular way, often with a lot of jewellery, and whose behaviour many people find offensive.
Daphne – No, that’s inadequate. It’s how the definition started, but now it’s expanded and is used for the kind of people/values/attitude encapsulated by David and Victoria Beckham, who are the uncrowned king and queen of Chavdom. Here are some far more useful links:
http://www.slate.com/id/2145165/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Users-Guide-Britains-Ruling-Class/dp/0553817132
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-409087/The-Chav-Rich-List.html
http://www.rbooks.co.uk/product.aspx?id=0553817132
http://www.chavtowns.co.uk/2004/10/yeovil-the-hidden-gem-of-chav-culture/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4381140.stm
I was under the impression that chav or charver was Geordie (charva) for rough kid. They have it in Spanish as well – chaval. But of course, I could be mistaken. Perhaps someone else could give a different explanation?
Daphne, you’re making my time in Saudi pass with a smile. Keep giving it to them…. (excuse my humble working class upbringing) bunch of TWATS.
I can’t understand the connection between wearing a chequered scarf and being a ‘chav’ moreso after reading wikipedia’s definition of the term:
“Chav (pronounced /ˈtʃæv/ (CHAV)) is a term applied to certain young people in the United Kingdom. The stereotypical “chav”—known also as a charver in Yorkshire and North East England—is an aggressive teenager, typically unemployed or of white working class background, who repeatedly engages in anti-social behaviour, such as street drinking, drug abuse and rowdiness, or other forms of juvenile delinquency.”
Can someone enlighten me what is the link between this and Sharon?
[Daphne – Your fault for insisting on using Wikipedia for reference. Chavs are upwardly mobile working-class people who are super-keen on what they perceive to be the outward trappings of the life they aspired to when they were children and other people were living it. They acquire the trappings alone, but not the manners and mores, and everything ‘sits’ wrongly and awkwardly. They also manifest naked delight in having arrived, in wearing designer labels, going to restaurants and ‘safar’. They think that buying an Alfa makes them middle class and that being able to pay the bill at at an expensive restaurant is an adequate substitute for learning how to use the cutlery there. They are brashly self-confident in their newly acquired life because they view diffidence or low-key behaviour as a sign of social inferiority, rather than the opposite. Basically, the key characteristic of chavs is a total lack of awareness that this is what they are.]
“I can’t understand the connection between wearing a chequered scarf and being a ‘chav’ ”
Google ‘Burberry chav’ and you’ll find the long-established connection, with many images to help.
Done:
http://kontent.freeblog.hu/Files/chav_scum_girl.jpg
Gross! Thanks for the smile!
Why don’t you enter this definition in Wikipedia? It sounds more amusing and more accurate actually, than the one quoted above.
But wouldn’t Sharon be a chavette? I thought that was the female form. I am still stuck at work and this little break on your blog is soooo entertaining.
Twanny, you didn’t understand a word of what Daphne wrote.
That’s because parrots can’t think before they speak.
Thanks for the kind explanation Daphne. Now it makes more sense.
About it being ‘my fault for insisting on using Wikipedia’, well it was the first link Google gave me. I wasn’t planning to insist on using it at all, that’s why I asked for enlightenment on the issue ;)
This post smacks of social snobbery and personal vendettas, and your comments below the line simply confirm it.
We are all products of our upbringing Daphne – you, I, and the two people in the photo. We all have our personal ticks and idiosyncrasies. Speaking English with a strong Maltese inflection may be annoying to some (myself included), but it has absolutely nothing to do with the intellectual or intrinsic worth of a person.
The whole hamallu vs tal-pepe’ mentality is something more suitable to a school playground, as are many of your comments: boasting of your familial lineage, of your family’s lack of “insecurities or fears” or of your “social background” is petty and undermines your credibility.
I, for one, couldn’t give a toss whether you (or Sharon) come from nobility, an orphanage or a brothel. It hardly matters much, in the grand scheme of things, whether Joseph Muscat pronounces ‘middle class’, ‘middilklas’. You may argue that it is symptomatic of a lack of education, but that’s a straw man. If elocution were a measure of worth, Robert Mugabe would be worth ten Mandelas.
Praise and condemn, but do so for their actions. I think it was Euripedes who wrote: Judge a tree from its fruit, not from its leaves.
I admire your courage and tenacity in going after magistrate Scerri Herrerra, and think that Malta’s media landscape will be much changed – for the better – once this situation blows over (although that may be a good while away). But mocking people for their upbringing simply alienates people like myself – people who are well-educated and reasonably erudite but with parents (and uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents) who have no idea of what to do with a fish knife, went to see ‘Maltageddon’ twice and think Vogue is some sort of racing car. Does that make them worthy of ridicule? Because it strikes me as quite Orwellian, in a ‘some people are more equal than others’ sort of way.
[Daphne – You deliberately misunderstand me so as to give that chip a good work-out. You obviously do care about these things because that is why you are so exercised. It is precisely because nobody in my family is a snob or behaves like one that chavs like Sharon see the absence of airs and graces and interpret that an indication of humble origins. People’s backgrounds don’t interest, bother or intrigue me at all. In fact, I have written often about the fact that I am bored to tears by the company of most of my own kind – the result of over-exposure, perhaps – and find almost anyone else far more interesting. Chavs like the very aspirational (‘we have arrived’) types now running the Labour Party and gathering in its fold are, however, something else. They are a social type which begs to analysed, scrutinised and, yes, pilloried. The pillorying is inevitable because of their very transparent self-satisfaction. A chav isn’t a working class person but a working-class person who thinks he is not and who uses the trappings of aspiration like a child uses toys, and equally awkwardly, too. Nobody is going to laugh at your family, so don’t worry. You’re only asking to be laughed at when you take to the public stage and start preaching about the ‘mitilkless’ when you just don’t have a clue about how the middle class thinks.]
I beg to differ: it is you who deliberately misunderstand me. I never said that I don’t care what people think of my family – what I said was that it shouldn’t matter one iota what your or Sharon Ellul Bonici’s family backgrounds are (while making the disclaimer that I neither know you nor her).
I have no axe to grind with you or your views – as I mentioned in my previous post, I actually agree with much of what you’ve written over the past weeks.
You write: “You’re only asking to be laughed at when you take to the public stage and start preaching about the ‘mitilkless’ when you just don’t have a clue about how the middle class thinks”
By that token, a middle-class politician can only ever serve the middle class. Quite a reductionist view, I would think.
By the way, I think you’re misconstruing what a chav actually is. What you seem to be describing is the nouveau riche, not a chav: the very word ‘chav’ is usually considered to be an acronym for ‘Council Housed And Violent’ (similarly, in Scotland chavs are known as ‘Neds’ – Non-Educated Delinquents).
[Daphne – It’s not. It was first used – or noticed to be used – by one of the actors who had a leading role in The Kumars, a series about British Indians.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5jXpeV8rug
So the Bay City Rollers would be the original chavs.
http://so-me.coolcats.fr/wp-content//bay_city_rollers.jpg – And to think they were cool!
Yep, and I was their most fervent fan when I was a little girl. Madly in love with Lesley, the one wearing those pair of ‘ugly venims’ in the picture.
Dak ta’ fuq il-lemin wehillu sebghu maz-zipp!
French playwright, Moliere, tells a lot about ‘chavs, in his “Les Bourgeois Gentilhomme”. It’s hilarious, still very actual and profound.
How do you know that Burberry has become cliche and chavvy? I mean I knew that, but hell, I didn’t know other Maltese people did.
[Daphne – Because I don’t watch only Super One and read only the Maltese newspapers.]
Sometimes greed, selfishness, and status can rob us of our happiness.
Of lately (mainly thanks to your blog) we have been reading certain ‘carry ons’ of our local bigwigs. Have they forgotten that they cannot move around like ordinary citizens? They will be immediately be stared and sniggered at. They have lost a lot of ‘freedom’ in their quest for money and fame.
As the saying goes, if I remember correctly, “You pays your money and you takes your chance.”
Daph, I know and DO appreciate that this is your blog, but can you spare us the colourful expletives your ‘other fan club’ is regaling you with? Please.
When you hear a young teen repeating what was printed on some of the blogs, one tends to get embarrassed. A few asterisks would suffice.
Again I say, its your blog, so I can only ask. Thank you.
Burberry has admitted that chavs and their adoption of its famous beige check are partly to blame for disappointing UK sales…as chavs adopted the Burberry check as part of their uniform, sales of Burberry goods in the UK have reportedly reduced by around 40%. Some shops have even considered removing Burberry goods from sale.Burberry boss, Rose Marie Bravo, decided to discontinue the now infamous Burberry baseball cap – a chav favourite – and have reduced the number of Burberry products that display their classic plaid to just 15% (Telegraph UK). Sharon must have bought her “classic plaid” before Burberry decided to adopt these measures!
I don’t think that as Maltese people we have anything that can translate – culturally – to “chav”. But it’s interesting to note that in evolution there are two theories that could describe this phenomenon.
The first is analogy, where geographically separate but similar environments drive evolution such that each niche is filled by a particular organism e.g. kangaroos and cows are both grazers.
It could be that a certain stratum of society is “designed” to fill a given niche, consequently they would be attracted to certain “status symbols”.
The second is convergent evolution, where similar physical characteristics are reached from different “starting points” e.g. sharks and porpoises or aardvarks and echidnas. One wouldn’t expect organisms subsisting on the same resource to be radically different. Similarly, one can expect people who aren’t radically different to go for the same things.
It’s hard for me as a Maltese person living in Malta to identify anything local with a chav, if anything because we don’t have the nuances of social classes they have in England.
[Daphne – That’s what you think, Reuben. We definitely do. And part of the Labour Party’s marketing problem is that they can’t identify them, precisely because they are nuances and Labour politicians know nothing about subtlety.]
I think that the idea of classes in the English sense only superficially fits our society, not least because it came quite late in the day.
[Daphne – It came at roughly the same time it did everywhere else, with the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath.]
A Burberry scarf is still the height of elegance compared to the cow costume she wears in Brussels.
The same thing is happening to Louis Vuitton handbags in Malta, and elsewhere.
Some people have been wearing Burberry from way before it was considered ‘chav’. Whether or not people are working-class or not, you can’t deny that it costs a lot of money – possibly then even more than now. So now people are expected to throw away all their Burberry, Chanel and Gucci just because ‘chavs’ are also wearing such?
No. People will wear continue designer check, and as long as they’re not worn with tracksuit bottoms, and as long as they’re not being leary in the streets, as long as they’re behaving like civil human beings, then they’re not chavs.
And before we go on to asking the PL to turn their ‘Torca’ banner into brown and black check, lets remember that whether we like it or not, these people are decent people. Not necessarily upper-class, but hardly chavs, either.
Define ‘decent’ in relation to the two people featured above.
On a cruise forum recently, some Brits were complaining that because the cruise lines were reducing fares, many chavs were taking cruises. As cruising used to be reserved for the rich once, the fact that they were on a cruise ship meant they had ‘arrived’.
These Brits say the chavs stand out and can be spotted straight away. Most of us would instantly recognise them too even if we were quite unable to pinpoint exactly what they were doing wrong.
Kev,
I can’t understand why, when certain people want to criticize those they label as ‘tal-pepe’ , they mention the fact that they don’t speak English properly.
When I was at school, the children who spoke heavily accented English with bad syntax, grammar and using expressions clearly translated from Maltese were, I suppose, a Maltese version of chavs.
I also don’t get the dark-skinned bit.
Oh dear! I guess that does it then. I have a short Burberry scarf that I’m very fond of. It goes very vell with a brown outfit that I have. It’ll have to go then, lest I’m revealed for the chav that I am.
[Daphne – A brown outfit. I hope for your sake that you’re not a man.]
I am. What’s wrong with men wearing brown, Daph?
Haha, of all people, you’re asking Daphne for fashion advice?
[Daphne – Let’s put it this way, Sam. Many women here can’t wear the things I do because 1. they’re too short; 2. they’re too fat; 3. they’re too old; 4. they’re too young; 5. they can’t carry it off; 6. they lack imagination and self-confidence and so dress like clones of each other and then wonder why they don’t get the attention they so obviously think they deserve. Given that you charged into this blog first to defend Marlene Mizzi, that gives me some idea of your taste in clothes.]
Chavs come with all sorts of accessories …
http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/alfred-sant-joseph-muscat.jpg
Haven’t you got better things to do? I have two original Burberry scarves and sorry I’m not a chav. You have taken it way too far now. Be careful as all this is putting off even P.N. activists.
[Daphne – Ooooooh. Two Burberry scarves, eh? Lucky girl.]
balls, balls, huge metal balls!
LOL, I missed so much in the last weeks with no access to the internet!
Have to catch up!
I just wish to state one fact. As a Burberry fan, i would suggest that you vwisit : ww.burberry.com and also watch the burberry catwalks on youtube.
You will notice the prices, and the tailoring, also the chic wear of Burberry.
It doesn’t mean that just because the burberry classic check has been copied, that it is cheap and chavy.
I would also like to call to your attention to the fact that Burberry are a huge establishment worldwide, and make lots of money not just by using the classic check,
but also by introducing the supernova black check and other burberry designs.
However, the classic check will always feature somewhere in the collection as that’s how it was released by Thomas Burberry himself.
Also, I do not consider myself a chav, and I have many Burberry items, so please, for future reference do not stereotype people