Burberry

For reasons I won't disclose I was curious about the term 'bogan' and then stumbled across the term 'chav' which I had encountered before in an artwork entitled 'Queen of the Chavs' by Aly Fell. I latched onto the term at the time, because Bryce when he's been talking about the BBC youth drama 'Skins' had been telling me a caveat that British youth weren't like any other. They loved coating themsleves in instatan, peroxiding their hair to the nth, and getting it braided.
This again made an impression on me because on the streets of Glasgow I had been stopped by a young lady who fitted this description perfectly.

Now in the wikipedia article all these impressions condensed into a compulsion to go from bogan to chav to truly appreciate the difference. Here's an excerpt:

Burberry is a clothing company whose products became associated with the "chav" stereotype. Burberry's appeal to "chav" fashion sense is a sociological example of prole drift, where an up-market product begins to be consumed en masse by a lower socio-economic group. Burberry has argued that the brand's popular association with "chav" fashion sense is linked to counterfeit versions of the clothing. "They’re yesterday's news", stated Stacey Cartwright, the CEO of Burberry. "It was mostly counterfeit, and Britain accounts for less than 10% of our sales anyway."[23] The company has taken a number of steps to distance itself from the stereotype. It ceased production of its own branded baseball cap in 2004 and has scaled back the use of its trademarked checkered/tartan design to such an extent that it now only appears on the inner linings and other very low-key positions of their clothing.[24][25] It has also taken legal action against high-profile infringements of the brand. In August 2006, a company introducing tuk-tuk vehicles into the south coast town of Brighton, England named one the "Chavrolet", which had it painted in the distinctive Burberry tartan. However, the company soon had to withdraw this vehicle when Burberry threatened proceedings for breach of copyright.[26]

Fascinating. I have long been out of the marketing game, but there's always these things that take me back.

Interestingly, the preference for Burberry is actually shared by Japan. And that isn't the only cultural isomorphism, the preference for bleached hair and instatan, and to an extent even braids is shared by the Japanese tribe fashion of 'ganguro' (lit. 'black face') AND the Australian phenomena that I'm not sure is official but I describe as 'footy-chicks' because I'm pretty sure I've heard that before.

What's most fascinating is the 'prole drift' concept, that after numerous experiences society can't seem to get it's head around anywhere in the world.
It's sort of a free market vs. of revenge as George Orwell puts it:

Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

Which is one of my favorite quotes ever. I must have used it 6-times already. Or there's Groucho Marx's classic:

I sent the club a wire stating, "PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER".

For some reason, people buy knock off handbags in China and South East Asia as if they are doing something clever. 'Chavs' appararently buy knock off Burberry Accessories for reasons beyond my comprehension. In this department Burberry is not alone, I had had it explained to me as to why Tommy Hilfiger and moreso, Polo Ralph Lauren had infiltrated hip hop culture, and that was a convoluted 'prole-drift' story if ever I heard one.

Step 1. Ralph Lauren became a staple of hip-hop wear because it was too expensive for any street kid to purchase, hence wearing it meant you had shoplifted something really expensive.

Step 2. Ralph Lauren gets street cred for being stolen all the time, hence wannabe hip-hop flavored rich people start legitimately buying Ralph Lauren clothing to immitate poor people.

Step 3. Supremely rich members of the Hip-Hop community (Puff Daddy, Jay-Z) when not wearing their own labels, legitimize the trend by endoursing it themselves.

Burberry just doesn't seem to want to make good on the chav movement. It seems nobody likes them.

Interestingly, the exception to all this is Japan, which I hate because I know they get off on nihonjinron and refuse to acknowledge themselves as just plain human beings, but in Japan, everyone has Burberry. Everyone.

But they don't buy knockoffs like people in the west do, they buy the real deal. Japan accounts for 30% of worldwide sales for Louis Vitton etc. They can spot fakes like nobodies business. You'd almost the cult of the brand had been part of their formal education.

But they like everyone else, don't get the concept of 'exclusive'. As Groucho Marx put it. The thing that makes luxury brands desirable to middle class societies like Australia, and Working class societies like Japan and the UK, is that you can't have it. When you have it, the value is gone.

If you scaled Angelina Jolie's income to your own, you would find that her Prada bag is the equivalent of a $10 handbag to us. Plus, the value is not in the utility, sure it may be made out of quality materiels, that feel smoother, or feel organic, the stitching doesn't come apart and the zippers don't get stuck. But it's still a bag full of shit dangling from your arm. Utility wise it's as valuable as a couple of plastic bags, it can be used for transporting a bunch of shit.

Nobody is ever in the situation where they say: 'Thank god that handbag was made out of italian leather by European artisans, if I had a pleather bag that bear would have devoured us for sure!' Doesn't happen.

The GFC is interesting because it sort of buried the marketing story of the 90's and 2000's which was finding a way to cram more diamonds onto any surface to keep feeding the prole drift. There simply was no item luxurious enough that people could ever feel themselves to be exclusive, because whatever diamond studed mobile phone or necklace came out, it was mass produced, mass marketed and mass consumed.

They Japanese may react differently to the same stimulus, which is that they buy a real Louis Vitton instead of a fake one, but we are all the same in wanting to purchase a lifestyle that we don't have, so that somehow some person on the street might think we are a movie star or ... well basically, that we haven't wasted our lives on a meaningless career. But in the end, it's no good lying to ourselves. We know we are singaporean, we know we grew up in ballarat, we know we lost WWII, we know our government sucks, we know we have no street cred, we know we work in a textile factory, we know we went to private school, we know we never won a fight, we know we aren't a movie star, we know we got divorced at 28...