People who aren’t chavs think that chavs are offended by the word. I’m a chav and I can tell you with authority that we’re not. Trust me, I have a ghastly Welsh accent, filler in my lips and a penchant for Burberry nova check. Until recently I never even thought calling someone a chav was an insult. I use the term all the time as a compliment, of sorts.

A clip of Kim Kardashian wearing the chav make-up look of yesteryear went viral on social media this month. Taking part in the ‘M to the B challenge’, a TikTok craze that has been going since 2020, Kardashian threw on an orange foundation shade, plus clumpy mascara and ‘concealer lips’ in homage to the British chav.

What is usually a staple of a young girl readying herself for a night on the town in Liverpool was adopted by a reality TV star and business mogul worth £1.5billion. A chav win, surely, though various commentators used Kardashian’s stunt to argue that the word was outdated and patronising.

‘The word chav – though, being American, Kardashian is unlikely to know – is just not a word we use any more,’ wrote the Evening Standard’s Abha Shah. ‘It’s embarrassing and classist.’

Who is the royal ‘we’ there? It certainly isn’t chavs, who have always leaned into chaviness as the opinion-forming classes withdraw in disgust. Shah wouldn’t know a chav if she got slapped by one outside a nightclub.

The official definition of a chav is a young person characterised by coarse and brash behaviour. That doesn’t really come close to explaining the subtleties and widespread cultural essence of the British chav. If you are outside right now, on the Tube or in the coffee shop, you probably have one next to you. Don’t stare.

There is confusion over the etymology of the word. It could be from the Romany word chavi – meaning child – which was recorded in the 19th century. Others say ‘chav’ derives from ‘Chatham average,’ a reference to the inhabitants of Kent town. There are different words for chav in different parts of the country; knackers, skangers, spides, charvers, scallies, neds. None of those words has quite the same power.

The word as we know it sank into public consciousness in the early noughties – think Shameless, The Catherine Tate Show, and it was soon scooped up by the press.

The Guardian — which still regards itself as a protector of the working class even though its readership is exclusively middle-class — once defined chav as ‘the noun which describes young men who wear cheap gold jewellery and baseball caps and hang around in shopping centers all over Britain.’ But that was only ever a small sub-section. Chavs have evolved and smartened up. The Slazenger trainers, baseball caps, and CP company coats have gone. Now it’s all Gucci and Balenciaga.

The Chav ascetic has always been about deception, which is something snooty people never understand. The 90s chav look evolved from male football fashion in the late 70s and 80s — the casuals. Football skinheads had started to attract the unwanted attention of security guards and police officers around the grounds. In an attempt to curb bad behaviour, bobbies would order the boys to take off their Doc Martens and leave them outside the stadium. Nothing if not savvy, the hooligans adopted a new look. When following England teams across Europe, the boys picked up French and Italian sportswear items from brands such as Lacoste, Sergio Tachini, Ellesse and Fila, allowing them to slip into the stadiums unnoticed.

Arsenal fans take to the streets of Copenhagen in 2000 (Credit: Getty Images)

Genius, no? What kind of policeman would think badly of anybody dressed like a suave tennis star?

This started a pattern which still keeps elite fashion buyers up at night: the chavification of glamorous brands. Look at what happened to Burberry – a company that received the prestigious Royal Warrant in 1955 – after casuals adopted the Burberry cap as part of their uniform.

In 2004, after a heavy period of football rioting by the self-labeled ‘Burberry Boys’, the brand finally ordered manufacturers to discontinue their checked-caps range and clear shelves. The association would forever be etched in people’s brains. In the words of Peter York, author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, ‘Quite a lot of people thought that Burberry would be worn by the person who mugged them.’

But chavs have a canny ability to adapt to (or steal) whatever new luxury item they can spoil for the rich people who despise them. This, especially in women’s fashion, has led to a certain symbiosis of glamour and chavvy chic.

The high-point of that process was the WAG Class of the 2006 World Cup. With their Louboutins and oversized sunglasses, the wives and girlfriends of England’s football team showed the world that a certain chaviness could be desirable.

Of course, the middle-classes still looked down their noses at Victoria Beckham, Coleen Rooney, Cheryl Cole, Abbey Clancy et al. But these women, in their defiance, gave every young woman from a provincial town the nod to dig out their darkest shade of foundation and backcomb their hair until it fell out in clumps. Never really out of fashion, Chavvy Chic suddenly found itself at the forefront.

It wasn’t just fashion. The WAGs were chavettes in every glorious sense of the word. They danced drunk on tables, blew tens of thousands of their husbands’ dosh in shopping sprees and happily let the tabloids see them topless. Abbey Clancy’s World Cup adventure ended early after she was shipped back when pictures came out of her sniffing cocaine. Being a chav is all about the highs and lows.

There will inevitably be people who disagree with the pride I take in chavs. It is widely thought to be a despicable term used to shame the council housed and the violent. Yet it tends to be the most patronising, public-schooled professors — the people who least understand the way the underprivileged think — who want to prove they are chav-allies. What they don’t realise is that chavs don’t care. Being a chav is a lifestyle choice just like anything else – like being a goth or an emo or a mod. I’ve met more rich chavs than poor ones. Have you been to Ascot?

In Owen Jones’s terrible book, Chavs, he claimed that chav-bashing is the ‘bastard child of a very British class war.’ What Jones failed to recognise is that chav transcends class. Call it the tinker horse shoe theory: working-class chavs have more in common with the upper-class than goths do with emos. They marry their cousins, drive old banger cars, eat pigeon, do drugs. Like chavs, upper-class families have no respect for bourgeois conventions. Many chavs liked Boris Johnson because his shambolic love life resembled their own.

Owen Jones is a class warrior, which means he has to keep things simple. Rich and poor; right and wrong. He presents the working class as a caricature, a single bloc. But what really drives the hatred of the word chav is not a love of the Burberry People. It is a contempt for the chavvy desire to ape the lifestyles of the rich and the famous.

Jones’s thesis has a fatal flaw. He mistakenly thinks that ‘chavs’ and ‘the working class’ are synonymous and shows no attempt to distinguish between the two. To him, there are the chavs and chav-nots. The chavs are the ones that go on The Jeremy Kyle Show, and anybody else is a nasty, Tory-voting capitalist.

Speaking of Kyle, left-wing commentators have long misunderstood the entertainment aspect of chav world. They think that lowbrow reality TV is created to patronise and embarrass those who take part, particularly chavs. Programmes such as Benefits Street or Can’t Pay? We’ll Take it Away are called ‘poverty porn’, and (usually privately educated) opinion-formers express their disgust for the ‘victims’ — as if they relate or care.

When you understand the chav, however, you realise that chavvy reality TV contestants aren’t being taken advantage of. After all, they sign up to be a part of these shows, and usually receive some kind of financial reward.

Is it better to pretend these people don’t exist in the hope they’ll go away? After all, people really do illegally claim benefits. Some are very proud of their status. I once asked someone in high school what she planned to do when she finished her GCSEs. ‘Claim benefits, like my mam,’ she said. Good for her.

Look past the shiny tracksuits, the gloss and the trainers, and you see that the chav is a cosmopolitan development. The chav is the result of an increasingly mobile and international upper-working class who aren’t rich but are able to jet around Europe on Easyjet. They can live in newly built Barratt homes with kids in matching pyjamas for Instagram. They have plastic lawns and eat cheeky Nando’s. It is Molly Mae and Tommy Fury. It is fat removal and ‘working in finance.’ Chav is money, now. Chavs are defiant. Chavs are winning.

Whatever you think of them, whether you zip your handbag sitting next to one on the bus, or laugh at their arses hanging out of low-rise jeans, one thing is sure: the chavs shall inherit the Earth.