Consumption and place: the phenomenology of relational economic geography

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to research on geographies of consumption and relationality in economic geography by analysing the interconnection of consumption and place in practice, based on ethnographic research. This text focuses on consumption defined broadly to include a choice of clothing and lifestyle among young people in a British town characterized as ‘chavs’. The research is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, including photo-elicitation interviews, observations and participant observations. To analyse the ways in which consumption is related to place, this text integrates conceptual frames used in economic, cultural and social geography with perspectives developed in economic sociology and anthropology. The study takes a relational approach in both theory and fieldwork. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that place and style consumption are relationally constitutive through practices of association and dissociation. We thereby show that the meanings attached to a place may derive partly from acts of consumption by those living there, but also that the relationship of meaning construction goes from consumption to the constitution of place. Our analysis presents evidence that style and the value attributed to people’s practices are co-constituted by the inhabitants, as well by other, typically external actors, such as bloggers and the media.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity; style
• phenomenology
• relationality
• dissociation
• photo-elicitation
• meaning

Introduction

Over the past three decades, economic geographers have shown an increasing interest in consumption, resulting in a stronger focus on the interrelationships between economic and consumption geographies (Gregson 2000; Jackson and Thrift 1995; Mansvelt 2012). This is particularly the case in geographical research in retail (Mansvelt 2012), the creative/cultural industries (Ernkvist and Ström 2018) and brands/branding (Pike 2013). The most common starting point for geographical research in studies on consumption and retail, however, is still production rather than consumption (Mansvelt 2012; Sheppard and Barnes 2017). Studies tend to focus on how producers, intermediaries and institutional frameworks shape or influence consumption geographies (cf. Clark et al. 2018; Sheppard and Barnes 2017). As we show in the next section, analyses of consumers’ own meanings and practices are still relatively rare in economic geography. Moreover, although relationality is commonly acknowledged in economic geography, the relationship between place and consumption remains an underdeveloped dimension in this subdiscipline (cf. Bathelt et al. 2017).

To this end, the present paper examines how place and consumption are relationally constituted by focusing on emplaced practices of style consumption. Through relational ethnographic research on young people in a marginalized town on the outskirts of London and an examination of how they are represented in public discourse, we study how clothes obtain their meaning in relation to how groups of people use them in public spaces, in real life and on the internet. We do this by analysing how young people portrayed as ‘chavs’ appropriate Burberry and other brands by means of consumption; as a result, the meanings of chavs, Burberry and the places of concentrated consumption change. ‘Chav’ is a stigmatizing term used about white British working-class youths, who adopt a particular style and are purported to engage in particular practices, such as teenage pregnancy, ‘dole scrounging’ and petty crime (Jones 2011; le Grand 2015). This paper makes a theoretical contribution by integrating conceptual frames used in economic, cultural and social geography with perspectives developed in economic sociology and anthropology. Our analysis is grounded in phenomenology and extends economic-geographic theorizing on relationality and practice by departing from a relational-constitutional approach, which is present in both theory (Boggs and Rantisi 2003; Emirbayer 1997), and empirical research (Desmond 2014). This approach is partly integrated in contemporary economic geography, but then primarily with production and industry analysis (Bathelt and Glückler 2018), and branding (Ibert et al. 2019; Pike 2013), although class, place and gender have also been addressed from a relational point of view (McDowell 2004).

Our main finding is that the concentration of style consumption practices among groups of people in one or more territorial location makes it possible to construct associations between place and the consumption of dress, including specific brands. But importantly, consumers can also engage in relational practices of dissociation to resist such associations. We show that a place partly gets its meaning as a result of acts of consumption on the part of those living there, but also that the relationship of meaning construction goes from consumption to the constitution of place. This connection is often observed in different cities, and certain districts, with distinctive cultures. Our analysis complements the production-centred economic analysis of space with a consumption-centred economic analysis.

Based on this relational notion of consumption and place, our principal research question is, as an effect of this approach, twofold:

How is place constituted by consumption and how is consumption constituted by place?

A relational approach presupposes that one place is related to and constituted in relation to other places, as well as to others’ activities and the notion of the public. We zoom in on the consumption of style as a practice. To conduct an empirical analysis, we turn our principal question into a concrete empirical research question:

How, if at all, is the concrete place studied (‘Satellite Town’) constituted by the consumption of a certain style (chavs)?

In what follows, we first review the existing literature, which indicates the gaps in economic-geographic research on consumption, particularly in relation to notions of place. Next, we present our theoretical approach, followed by a discussion of our methods and material. The bulk of the paper consists of an empirical analysis, which starts with an ethnographic description of the research site, including emplaced stylistic practices. We then analyse how style is consumed in place, and specifically how ‘chav style’ is portrayed in denigratory ways and partly constitutive of place. Before concluding, we study how youths in the area try but find it difficult to dissociate themselves from this style, because they are situated there both socially and spatially.

Economic geography and consumption

In economic geography, research has traditionally focused on production rather than consumption. As already mentioned, a greater focus on consumption has involved attempts to integrate economic and cultural geographies (Gregson and Crewe 2003; Jackson and Thrift 1995; Mansvelt 2012). This can be related to a trend from the dominance of ‘production’ to ‘consumption’ in social life (Warde 2002), which can be seen as part of the cultural (see Goss 2004 for a review) or relational (Boggs and Rantisi 2003) turn in research. Ideas of consumption in economic geography are imported from, above all, sociology and social/cultural geography (Aoyama, Murphy, and Hanson 2011), and a relational approach furthers this interdisciplinarity (Bathelt and Glückler 2018).

Research in retail has addressed the high density of consumers in urban areas (Glaeser, Kolko, and Saiz 2001), their spatial concentration around particular nodes in the city (Crewe 2017 Currid and Williams 2010;), and strategies of retailers; but it focuses less on consumers’ practices (Mansvelt 2012; Sheppard and Barnes 2017; Wrigley et al., 2002). Thus, ‘Retail geographies … often stop at the “shop door,” with consumption theorized as the “outcome” of economic imperatives’ (Mansvelt 2012).

Similar limitations can be identified in related economic geographic research which examines the production of culture (Power and Scott 2004) in relation to consumption by looking at the cultural industries, for example, the digital economy (Nathan, Vandore, and Voss 2019), the fashion industry (Hauge, Malmberg, and Power 2009; Rantisi 2014) or the video game software industry (Ernkvist and Ström 2018). The relationship between cities and industries is a large field of research (Jansson and Power 2010; Martínez 2007; Power and Hauge 2008; Tokatli 2012; 2013). There are also more metaphorical usages of space (Debarbieux 2019). Moreover, research on branding has examined how firms forge geographical associations, for example, Burberry through notions of ‘Britishness’, to construct symbolic value around brands/commodities (Pike 2013). Dialectically related to associations (Bair 2019) are dissociations (Bair 2019; Ibert et al. 2019), which denote ‘proactive and reactive relational work chiefly aimed at hiding potentially problematic aspects from consumers’ awareness’ (Ibert et al. 2019, 44), which is achieved by ‘practices of weakening or obscuring meaningful negative links between a brand/commodity and other entities’ (Ibert et al. 2019, 49). One example is fashion companies that seek to dissociate their brands from disreputable sites of production (Ibert et al. 2019). But although these studies address consumption and the role of consumers as co-producers of value (Pike 2013), they generally lack analysis of consumers’ own meaning-making.

Consumer practices and identities are addressed mainly in research on retail within the family and domestic sphere (Ariztia et al. 2016; Gregson 2000; Gregson and Crewe 2003; Mansvelt 2012). What is less acknowledged in these studies, despite their contribution to consumption geographies, is the relationship between consumption practices and the characteristics attributed to particular places (although see the study of two shopping centres by Miller et al. 1998). Online and physical consumption are studied, also in hybrid format (Jansson 2019; Jansson and Hracs 2018), often as translocal and multiscalar spaces (Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013). There are several studies on the relations between place and identity (Antonsich 2013), but less has been done on the link that consumption establishes between place and identity, which is our topic of interest.

In sum, economic geography generally underplays consumption. Although many handbooks, textbooks and other overviews in this subdiscipline have come to include chapters or sections on consumption (Coe, Kelly, and Yeung 2007; 2013; 2020; Crewe 2011; Gregson 2000; Jayne 2006; MacKinnon and Cumbers 2018; Mansvelt 2012; Sheppard and Barnes 2017), some texts (Clark et al. 2018; 2000) still marginalize the topic (see also Aoyama, Murphy, and Hanson 2011; Barnes and Christophers 2018; Wood and Roberts 2010). The New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography (Clark et al. 2018) is a case in point. In over 1200 pages the topic of consumption is rarely addressed at length from consumers’ own perspectives. It could be argued, then, that consumption is still partly an ‘emerging theme’ (Aoyama, Murphy, and Hanson 2011) at the ‘borderlands’ of economic geography (Gregson 2000; Mansvelt 2012), as earlier commentators put it.

In disciplines adjacent to geography, notably archaeology, history, anthropology and sociology, research shows the importance of sites of consumption, such as marketplaces (for example, Braudel 1992), interpreted broadly enough to include various types of rites (for example, Malinowski 1922). In post-industrial urban districts, retail and leisure spaces, such as malls, markets and cultural quarters, are increasingly highlighted as places of consumption (Miles 2015), and correlated with consumption in online marketplaces (Langley and Leyshon 2017; Nathan, Vandore, and Voss 2019), in addition to traditional marketplaces (for example, Dewey 2020). The ‘quality’ of shopping is determined to a large extent by which brands have, or do not have, stores in the city or a mall (Godart 2012). Space and identity are connected (Howard 2000). Urban neighbourhoods are associated with different forms of life, in terms of class and activity, as shown by Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) analysis of the opposition between forms of theatre produced on the ‘left bank’ and the ‘right bank’ in Paris. An interesting parallel to our study is how tourists ascribe meaning to places and people (Wherry 2012), which may be somewhat detached from the perceptions of those living or working there (Capone and Lazzeretti 2016; Urry 1995).

This paper explores the co-constitution of place and consumption by looking at the consumption of style. Certain neighbourhoods can be primed with the style consumption of subcultural groups (Kawamura 2006; Schiele and Venkatesh 2016) or figures (le Grand 2014; 2020; Maly and Varis 2016). In the growing field studying the online consumption of garments and other commodities (Srnicek 2017), emplaced practices of style consumption are dispersed in online spaces, such as the fashion blogosphere (Chittenden 2010; McQuarrie, Miller, and Phillips 2013). ‘Hipster' style, for example, is mediated through the consumption of certain brands, styles, objects and practices, which circulate translocally and take on different local, spatialized meanings, typically tied to gentrifying districts (le Grand 2020; Maly and Varis 2016).

Chavs as an example of style consumption

The present paper addresses style consumption and translocality in relation to so-called chavs. Since the early 2000s chavs have become a widespread subcultural figure used to stereotype white working-class youths across Britain (Jones 2011). Although place can never be neutral, our case accentuates the connection between place and consumption because of its combined social and physical characteristics. Chavs are associated with marginalized towns and neighbourhoods, especially council estates, often denigrated as ‘chav towns’ (Gidley and Rooke 2010; le Grand 2014).

‘Chav style’ is portrayed as excessive, vulgar and wasteful, and more broadly signals moral failings (Edensor and Millington 2009; le Grand 2010). Research has explored how young working-class men and teenage mothers may attempt to resist the stigma associated with being a chav by dissociating from it or recasting its meanings in more positive ways (Nayak and Kehily 2014; Rimmer 2010).

The term ‘chav’ was originally used in south-east England. Localities in other parts of Britain had different nicknames, such as charver, ned, scally and townie, labelling similar youth groups and their style consumption. But in the early 2000s chav diffused quickly, mainly because of the internet, to become an umbrella term to stigmatize white youths in localities all over Britain who adopt a certain style. In particular, chavs were cast as consumers of Burberry. Chavs’ conspicuous consumption of this international luxury brand (Moore and Birtwistle 2004) led to its devaluation in the United Kingdom and a slump in sales there. Burberry engaged in a reactive strategy of dissociation from the chav figure by drastically reducing the visibility of its trademark check from its products (for a more extensive discussion, see le Grand 2010; Power and Hauge 2008). Another consequence was that certain forms of policing targeted chavs. In semi-public places, certain people dressed in Burberry and other brands or styles associated with chavs were even banned (le Grand 2015). The chav style still exists and it received widespread public attention in the summer of 2020 when ‘chav check’ became a popular hashtag on TikTok and a trendy Instagram filter. In these processes, the term ‘chav’ was appropriated and reimagined by users outside the United Kingdom unfamiliar with its classist meanings. As a consequence, the term partly lost its denigratory and classist connotations (Di Martino 2022).

Despite the large general literature, we think there has been insufficient analysis of how, by means of consumption, the meanings of products, places and people are associated or dissociated. To add more knowledge in this area, we theorize the relations between place and consumption.

Theory – a relational approach

We argue for theory that not only makes metaphorical use of relations and relational space, but also departs from geographical notions of space and spatial positions. The growing dialogue between economic and cultural approaches in geography at large, following the cultural turn, has contributed to an increasing interest in relational and practice-oriented approaches in economic geography (Jones and Murphy 2011), concerned with the interrelation between time and a space (May and Thrift 2001). This research has examined how social relations, cultural norms and routinized practices are embedded in economic processes (Jones and Murphy 2011; Knight and Sharma 2016). Economic geographers have also taken important steps towards a more interactionist and relational approach to the spatial dimensions of consumption (Storper and Venables 2004). We think, however, that a more elaborated relational approach – which implies a rethinking of the central notion of place – is yet to be developed within this field.

By ‘consumption’ we mean acts of purchasing, as well as the use of objects or activity. This broad definition of consumption was developed by Marshall in the early part of the twentieth century (Aspers 1999; Marshall [1890] 1961). Marshall argued that peoples’ wants, making up the demand side, result from their activities when producing market supply. The activities are consequences of people’s wants, and it is thus a circular process that explains how production and consumption develop in relation to one another (Parsons 1931).

Buying and using clothes is a typical example of consumption. By employing a relational approach (Boggs and Rantisi 2003; Emirbayer 1997), we suggest that space and consumption of style are constitutive of one another, which means that actors do not ‘have’ relations, but ‘are constituted through them’ (Bathelt and Glückler 2018; Bathelt, Malmberg, and Maskell 2004).

Different relational approaches exist (Emirbayer 1997). We claim that a phenomenological approach is useful, especially when doing qualitative research (Aspers and Corte 2019). No thinker, however, has brought meaning, practice and space together more profoundly than Martin Heidegger (2001b). Heidegger argues that we discover the natural world only via our ongoing practices and activities – consumption in the widest sense. We are, in Heidegger’s terms, ‘in-the-world’, doing things: we (or what Heidegger in German calls Dasein, which literally means ‘being-there’, which is also the everyday German word for ‘existence’) move around, work, use tools, have conversations with others, go on the bus, make decisions, socialize with friends and the like. It is in relation to these concrete and practical activities that we discover how certain things are located in different places. ‘Objective’ – or ‘Cartesian’ – space is, according to Heidegger, ‘disclosed’ in and through our everyday practices (Heidegger 2001b, §§ 22–24, 70). To give a concrete example: when I wear my favourite team’s football shirt when it plays at home, this contributes to the meaning of the physical place; hence A.C. Milan’s football stadium is called San Siro and is what it is because of the activities – in the broadest sense, football – that take place there. One can express this in one condensed sentence; actions, human beings and objects are co-constitutive by their relations (Heidegger 2001a). Space, in this way, is in the world (cf. Schatzki 1991), and does not exist prior to or independent of our activities; the starting point is the phenomenological experience of the practice through which the spatiality is formed. Speaking in general terms, the meanings of practices, such as consumption, and of places are partly co-constituted through social processes, not causally related in a Cartesian space (Heidegger 2001b). Heidegger’s phenomenological approach differs from actor-network theory (ANT), which refers only to actants (Latour 2005), starting with the human being. Seen from a phenomenological point of view, things and humans do not exist at one and the same ontological level (Heur van, Leydesdorff, and Wyatt 2013); things and places are meaningful only in relation to human beings, and this, in addition, points to the centrality of qualitative research to gain access to and understand the practices of actors in which the relations are enacted and formed.

Heidegger’s philosophical writings, although sometimes discussed by human geographers (Joronen and Häkli 2017; Relph 1985; Shubin 2015), are clearly not directly applicable to empirical work; and his thinking has to be ‘operationalized’ to be useful in empirical research. Concretely, we propose that the consumption of style as a practice of actors partly constitutes the meaning of the place in which the activities are performed. The meaning of ‘Satellite Town’ is partly constituted by the way people living there dress, speak, use their bodies, and more generally ‘consume’ time and resources.

We conceive of a ‘style’ as the result of a selection and assemblage of elements (cf. Ostberg 2011) tied to particular, often contested meanings and practices. A style constitutes a ‘multidimensional self-referential aesthetic system produced and extended over time’ (Aspers 2006), which, to be recognized, must be used by several actors. To be identified as an active system that refers to itself requires spatial proximity, physical or online. A place in which inhabitants refer to one another in processes of mutual adjustment by means of observation (Goffman 1963; 1967; 1972) represents the ultimate arena for a style to develop and to be perpetuated (Kawamura 2006). In such a place, a style can become concentrated as it appears there relatively more frequently than in other places. The consumption of a certain lifestyle, which obviously includes certain garments, gives meaning to a physical space, such as a neighbourhood or a city as practical activity is constitutive of place. We use Goffman’s (1968) microanalysis of how actors’ identities are both managed and the result of both their own doings and the perceptions of others, and argue that it is partly via consumption, identification and dissociation that place becomes key. One argument here is that the co-constitution of style consumption and place entail relational processes, not just of identification and association (cf. Pike 2013), but also of dissociations (cf. Ibert et al. 2019) and stigma management (Goffman 1968) on the part of the different actors involved. In other words, both association and dissociation are modes of being that actors enact (Heidegger 2001b, § 26–27). Put differently, they are empirical instances of the same constitutive (ontological) relations (Mitsein) that exist between human beings (Heidegger 2001a). In economic geography, disassociation is studied primarily as strategic practice among (branded) firms (Bair 2019; Pike 2013). We extend this research by focusing on geographies of dissociation in relation to consumption, and stress the less overtly strategic ways in which consumers make dissociations. Rather we study the role of dissociative practices in their identity management and mutual adjustment through observation in relation to consumption and place. Psychologists (Šedová, Slovák, and Ježková 2016) have analysed dissociation in cases in which consumers are confronted with cognitive dissonance and shown how they react by supressing thoughts that conflict with their actions. In the following sections, we analyse the specific case of chavs as physically located and thereby giving meaning to the brands and clothing styles they adopt in their specific locality, as well as in relation to a wider public online. In our work, Heidegger’s relational approach is the point of departure in exploring the relations between place and consumption, and we use Goffman’s analysis of how actors mutually adjust to one another in public places to understand how certain styles come to be adopted. Next, however, we present the material and the methods, as well as an account of how we have analysed the material.

Method and the ‘Satellite Town’ field

This article draws primarily on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with young working-class people, conducted by the second author. Ethnographic research was carried out to explore the spatially situated consumption of style and brands in the everyday lives of the research participants over an extended period of time. As long-term fieldwork enables a closer relationship between the researcher and research participants, ethnography can ‘be used to reveal the complexities and subtleties of consumption practices’ (Hall 2016), and it is the most suitable method for relational analysis (Boggs and Rantisi 2003; Desmond 2014). Ethnographic fieldwork is used to make a theoretically generalized statement.

Fieldwork was carried out in ‘Satellite Town’,¹ a disadvantaged area located on the outskirts of South London, where the second author lived for five months and worked as a voluntary youth worker at two youth clubs, on and off from November 2007 to December 2008. This ethnographic study of course does not try to cover contemporary styles in this particular place. Our point is to use high-quality data to make a point that we believe could be made also for many other places, in the past and in the future.

Fieldwork at the youth clubs involved participant observation, observation and informal interviews with young people and staff, which were recorded as field notes. An important part of the ethnographic material is made up of observations, which can be done only by ‘being there’. Indeed, what in the text is called ‘there’ was obviously ‘here’ during the fieldwork. This in-depth ethnographic material serves as the context also for the central material of this paper, which consists of open-ended and conversational photo elicitation interviews conducted at one of the youth clubs during fieldwork with 16 working-class youths aged 13–17. All of the interviewees were white except for one girl, who defined herself as mixed race, and two boys, one of whom was Black African and the other of Chinese origin. Those interviewed have been granted anonymity, and care has been taken not to reveal sensitive material. The fieldwork followed the ethical principles of Stockholm University valid at the time.

To explore the research participants’ understandings of style and place, participants were asked to respond to a number of pictures of people and places resulting from an internet search for the term ‘chav’. For ethical reasons none of these pictures are reproduced in this article. Two types of image were used. First, to explore the participants’ conceptions of style they were shown a number of images of people associated with different subcultural styles, as well as some that were class-coded and gendered. The present article focuses on the participants’ reactions to pictures that depicted young, white people embodying a style of appearance associated with chavs. Secondly, images of Satellite Town and other places were chosen to explore the participants’ views of, and sense of belonging to, their hometown compared with other types of location (such as central London or Mediterranean Spain) and types of housing (for example, council housing, Victorian terraces or large detached houses).

Introducing images can ‘break down the unidimensional linguistic structure of the interview by adding a second, relevant, communicative element’ (Lapenta 2011), to stimulate an interviewee’s interpretative capacities around the social phenomenon under study (Harper 2002). Images function as a ‘third party’ (Collier and Collier 1986) or object of discussion between the interviewer and interviewee. This increases an interviewee’s influence over the interview situation, making it less asymmetric and increasing the possibility to establish trust between the participants (Lapenta 2011). One potential limitation of researcher-generated photo elicitation is that the researcher’s preconceptions and perspectives, rather than those of the participants, determine the selection of pictures (Lapenta 2011). In the present study, employing photo elicitation proved to be a highly productive means of ‘activating narrative production’ (Holstein and Gubrium 1995), as it allowed the interviewer to introduce the potentially sensitive topic of chavs without asking the participants about it directly. The interpretation of data proceeded in an iterative fashion vis-à-vis the theoretical framework (O'Reilly 2012) and gradually came to crystallize around the interrelationship between meanings of place, style consumption and chavs. All data analysis was aided by the use of the qualitative software program Atlas.ti. Representative quotations have been included in the text to best reflect the evidence in the material.

The research site from a distance

Before we get to our own – unique – empirical material, we take a brief look at the field, which its inhabitants more or less take for granted. Satellite Town was founded in the interwar period as a council estate on what was farmland and woodland. However, the core of present-day Satellite Town, which we have chosen to call ‘the Old Estate’, was built during the post-War period. The 1960s saw the construction of what became commonly known as ‘the New Estate’. It is generally considered to be more disadvantaged than the Old Estate.

Satellite Town consists mainly of terraced houses, many in red brick, as well as some larger houses and high rises. The area has a substantial amount of open space and woodland. It is also surrounded on most sides by green belts and has few direct geographical connections with other areas. Throughout its history, Satellite Town has therefore had poor transport links and has been isolated from neighbouring areas. Thus, despite being about one hour away from the centre of London there is a social distance from the milieu of centrally located parts of London. Most of the research participants rarely, if ever went to central London. ‘Going into town’ for them generally meant visiting the main town of the borough in which Satellite Town was located rather than going into central London, which they generally did on school trips or for special events.

In the 2001 Census, the most recent at the time of the fieldwork, the population in Satellite Town was around 21,500, more than half of whom live on the New Estate. The population is largely white – about 85 per cent – and the biggest ethnic minorities are Black Caribbean and Black African, each totalling about 4 per cent. As for socio-economic characteristics, the population of Satellite Town is mainly working-class. The proportions of council houses, single-parent households as well as children and young people are higher than the London and national average. Moreover, as unemployment levels are higher and economic activity lower than in London or nationally, particularly in the New Estate, the area scores high on measures of socio-economic deprivation (see le Grand 2010). Let us now switch focus from ‘Cartesian space’, as seen from a distance, to practices on the ground.

Analysis: local style practices

A detailed knowledge of the place, the people, their activities and, of particular value for this paper, their style is a condition of the analysis. Let us therefore take a ride on the bus to Satellite Town and walk its streets. What do people look like, what are they wearing and doing? This question is a concrete way of addressing the style practices of those living in the place. As Satellite Town is a small place, newcomers were quickly spotted and after a while one soon recognized people one had seen before. In terms of stylistic practices, there were many differences and variations in people’s clothing and appearance. Still, many residents, particularly among young people but to some extent across generations, appropriated elements of what in our analysis is termed ‘local style’. Young people, especially those in their early teens or younger, wore streetwear, such as tracksuits, baseball caps, ‘hoodies’ (hooded sweatshirts) and trainers. Certain fashion brands, such as Stone Island and Armani Jeans, were popular among this group, and markers of status. Casual clothing items, such as jeans, were also rather common, not least as mixed with streetwear or school uniforms. Among girls, glittery items were quite commonly worn and included scarves, belts, shoes, details on the back pockets of jeans, and eye shadow.

Most young participants wore jewellery, usually in gold or a less expensive material. Girls often wore hoop earrings and boys wore stud earrings. It was very common to wear rings, such as sovereign rings, and it was not uncommon to have rings on two or three fingers on each hand. Necklaces or bracelets were also rather common, with some youths wearing pendants, often with their initials. Tattoos, sometimes in the form of pictures or the names of family members, where also popular among young people.

Thus, the ethnography shows that particular practices of stylizing one’s appearance through clothing, jewellery, makeup and hair styles were commonly appropriated in Satellite Town. Our ethnographic observations, then, identify a local style, that is, a spatial concentration of certain stylistic practices in Satellite Town. The concrete acts of observation, recognition and consecutive mutual adjustment are hard to observe, and would require more space than is available here (but see Goffman [1963] for a detailed account and several examples of how this may occur). The next three sections explore young residents’ accounts of these geographically situated style practices, particularly in relation to the collective virtual social identity (Goffman 1968) of chavs, that is, the identity which is ascribed to them.

Style consumption in place

This section explores how young people in the area associated local style practices identified above with chavs and identified Satellite Town as a place with many chavs. This was particularly apparent in the photo elicitation interviews. One picture depicts a girl in a pink tracksuit, trainers, ponytail, big hoop earrings and golden jewellery. She sits at a bus stop smoking and holding a mobile phone to her ear.

Most participants identified the girl as a chav on the basis of her style of appearance – tracksuit, trainers, jewellery, cigarette – and the fact that she was ‘sitting on the road’. Dan, aged 17, is an example:

Interviewer:

What do you think of her style?

Dan:

Eh … As I would say: chavvy.

Interviewer:

Okay. So, what’s chavvy about this picture, I mean?

Dan:

Yeah, like, wearing all that jewellery (yeah), doing all that make up [inaudible]. Girls wearing really baggy clothing. … Also, that’s a typical Satellite Town girl. … That’s how most Satellite Town girls are.

It is notable that the style consumption of the ‘typical Satellite Town girl’ corresponds to the style attributed to chavs. In accounts such as this, meanings constructed around Satellite Town as a place become associated with, or even partly constitutive of chavs. Another picture used in the interviews depicted a group of white boys in tracksuits, baseball caps, trainers and short cropped haircuts, sitting on a fence in public space. Like the previous picture, participants identified the boys as chavs on the basis of their stylistic practices, including the streetwear brands they wore, such as Adidas, Nike and McKenzie. Participants also associated the supposed chavs in the picture with youths in Satellite Town, a few of whom frequented the youth club in which the interview took place. Again, they expressed a notion that Satellite Town was a place full of chavs; this was obviously grounded in the participants’ own observations. Elements of the local style observed earlier are interpreted as chav style, which become constitutive of the place meanings of Satellite Town. The frequency of stylistic practices tied to chavs, then, is tied to the meaning of place, also in the eyes of those actually living there.

Through the chav style, place characteristics of Satellite Town are also connected to particular brands. Designer brands are a conspicuous part of chav style in young people’s accounts. For Katie, aged 17, chavs were conspicuous consumers of jewellery and ‘fake’ designer clothing, particularly Burberry and Stone Island (see le Grand 2010 for more on different brands): ‘A big chav thing last year was, like, everyone wore Burberry. Fake Burberry hats, Burberry jackets and all things like that … Last year it was like a big statement [to wear Burberry]. And it was like [that with] Stone Island as well’. Other participants also identified chavs’ stylistic practices with Burberry. They suggested that there was an ongoing trade of counterfeit items. As one participant put it: ‘Back of the lorry, 25 quid, you know’. This affordability may explain the widespread practice and spatial concentration of wearing designer brands, meaning that they were incorporated into the local style in Satellite Town. These place-bound meanings draw on and reproduce widespread public representations of Burberry as a ‘chav brand’ (le Grand 2010; Power and Hauge 2008), which is tied to Satellite Town.

A certain aesthetic style has no inherent value per se, but it was clear that the ‘chav’ figure was an object of denigration among the research participants, as in Katie’s account:

Katie:

A chav is like … someone that wears tracksuits all the time, that wears fake designer clothes and everything has to be designer. That have jewellery everywhere.

Author:

Is it always fake?

Katie:

Yeah, it’s someone who tries to make themself [sic] look like they’ve got money but in the wrong way.

Similarly, the picture of the girl discussed earlier was mocked by participants for ‘not putting any effort into her looks’ and for having ‘trainers out of fashion’. These meanings can be related to common public representations of chavs’ consumption as conspicuous, aspirational, vulgar and excessive (le Grand 2010; 2015). In other words, the phenomenology of those living in the area is partly made up of their own experiences and observations, and partly of the internalization of the activities’ publicly ascribed meaning. In practice, the interplay of these ‘external’ and ‘internal’ meanings cannot easily be disentangled. These practices are institutional meanings of others to which one relates (Heidegger 2001a).

We can see that the meaning of ‘chav’ as well as of ‘Burberry’ and other brands are related to, and conceived as enacted in, the place, Satellite Town. Put differently, the consumption or use of certain garment brands is concentrated in certain areas. Conversely, through notions such as the ‘typical Satellite Town girl’, style practices become tied to Satellite Town as a place. Similar cases of place-bound stylistic practices – as well as corresponding discourses – circulate in the public realm of the internet. One example is the mocking nickname – the ‘Croydon facelift’ – given to the practice of wearing the hair scraped back in a knot associated with female chavs (le Grand 2010). A certain hairstyle here becomes tied not only to a chav identity, but also to a particular place, the town of Croydon. Beyond Satellite Town or Croydon, similarly, classist meanings of the chav figure are emplaced in various other marginalized localities or ‘chav towns’ in the United Kingdom.

Thus, while the style practices of the chav figure are diffused across the country, they have local expressions. In Satellite Town, there is a recurrence and spatial concentration of local style practices imagined as ‘chavvy’ and many chavs are said to live there. Widespread notions of chavs and chav style, then, form part of the meanings of this place. From an outsider perspective there are very many different places out there in which this style practice appears; for those living in Satellite Town, this experience is direct and ‘here’.

Chavs as a spatialized object of denigration

The meanings attached to chavs were linked not only to geographically concentrated style practices, but also to other morally loaded practices observed in Satellite Town as a place. Mark’s response is one example: ‘ASBO orders, drinking on the street, getting pregnant at a young age. Stuff like that. That’s the stereotype of the chav’. But he then added that ‘it’s just a few people, like, in Satellite Town you get certain people that get pregnant at young ages and that’. Mark, then, conceives of teenage motherhood and deviant practices as constitutive of the chav stereotype. He also referred to ASBOs or ‘anti-social behaviour orders’, which were originally conceived in an effort to impose certain moralized behaviours. But in contrast to other participants, he partially distanced Satellite Town from these practices (‘it’s just a few people’). Another example is Rebecca who, like many others, identified chavs on the basis of stylistic practices, including brands such as Burberry. But she also called male chavs ‘yobs’, associating them with aggressive and violent masculinity, which is common in public representations (le Grand 2010). Moreover, she claimed that the definition of the term ‘chav’ is ‘like council house, aggressive and violent’. The highly spatial and morally loaded acronym ‘[c]ouncil [h]oused [a]ggressive and [v]iolent’ has come to be widely diffused in the public realm. The term here connotes specific types of housing, namely council estates, which in Britain are usually distinct physical places associated with poverty and lack of morals, hence stigmatized markers of ‘spatial segregation by class’ (Webster 2008). As noted earlier, chavs are often cast as living on council estates and in other disadvantaged, (white) working-class areas, such as ‘chav towns’ allegedly ‘infested’ with chavs (Gidley and Rooke 2010; le Grand 2010; 2014). The cases of Satellite Town and other chav towns suggest that chav identity and its stylistic markers has a particular geography.

As discussed at length elsewhere (see le Grand 2014), Satellite Town was cast as one of these chav towns in public representations; in other words, it is the externally defined ‘social identity’ of its inhabitants (Goffman 1968). This was particularly evident in online comments on articles reporting on Satellite Town published in two local newspapers. Satellite Town was denigrated as ‘chav central’, full of teenage mothers, loutish kids and morally loaded practices, such as violence, criminality and anti-social behaviour. Its residents were portrayed as lazy, work-shy, irresponsible dole scroungers who have no qualms about letting ‘us’ respectable citizens pay for their lifestyle. Thus, the participants’ understanding of their home town as a place inhabited by many chavs was mirrored in more or less institutionalized (Berger and Luckmann 1991) public representations. Like the latter, young people similarly conceived of Satellite Town as a dangerous place where social problems and violent crime, such as stabbings, muggings and vandalism, were common. In the photo elicitation interviews, participants were shown images of Satellite Town that did not feature any people. They were then asked what came to their minds when looking at the images. Their reactions were telling. As Mike put it: ‘it looks like a nice little town. But it’s not a very nice little town, there’s a lot of violence around here’. Thus, to Britney, ‘in them pictures they’d made Satellite [Town] look clean’. The pictures were seen as idealized representations that masked the violence and reality of life there. As a resident, Satellite Town’s bad reputation was a source of shame for Katie: ‘some of my friends that live far away come into Satellite Town and are worried, and it’s like you feel ashamed to live here. That they’re scared of coming’. As she said this, Katie looked down and blushed – as if she was ashamed and embarrassed. Shame can be strongly felt among working-class people when their behaviour or way of living does not meet the perceived standards of middle-class respectability (Sayer 2005).

As we can see, the participants’ understandings of Satellite Town, chavs and chav style draw on, and reproduce, stigmatising meanings that circulate online in the public realm (Butler-Warke 2020; le Grand 2015). Like many other council estates, this means that Satellite Town’s place identity is spoiled, to paraphrase Goffman (1968). The chav figure is an important element of this spoiled identity. The meanings of Satellite Town as a chav town are constituted by moralized practices and marginality, as well as aesthetic and stylistic practices. Conversely, a certain style and brands, such as Adidas and Burberry, become symbolically devalued by the chav figure and its embeddedness in particular places (le Grand 2010; Power and Hauge 2008). Other denigrated consumption practices constitutive of the meanings of chav towns beyond clothing styles include, for example, Christmas lighting (Edensor and Millington 2009). The participants’ understandings of Satellite Town as denigrated serve to reproduce meanings related to ‘chav towns’ that circulate online in local newspapers and among the wider public. In other words, one’s sense of place is clearly mediated by views ascribed to inhabitants from the outside; aside from Mark’s response noted above there does not seem to be strong resistance to this ascribed view of Satellite Town as a place. It is clear, then, that the emplaced collective identities and their concomitant style consumption and moralized practices are enacted in relation to the public realm on the internet. Their meaning of style is constituted, then, not only by certain practices, but also by the rootedness of these practices in certain places.

Dissociating from chavs

We have demonstrated that there is a relationship between chav style, moralized practices and Satellite Town as a place. Thus, consumption and place are connected and partially co-constituted through ‘struggles between association and dissociation’ (Bair 2019, 70) among different actors. The participants enacted these interrelated meanings through their accounts. But in so doing, these young Satellite Town residents themselves risked being positioned as chavs living in this ‘chav town’. Given their negative views of chavs and chav style more broadly, it was unsurprising that they dissociated themselves from the term and applied it to others, some of whom they knew and who lived in Satellite Town. Dissociating from chavs, however, was not always straightforward and could cause tensions (cf. Goffman 1968). Many stylistic elements that participants referred to when identifying chavs were part of the local style and embedded in the consumption practices of Satellite Town as a place. Thus, the boundaries between the markers of taste associated with chavs and those adopted by the participants could be difficult to draw, with the latter using finely tuned criteria to avoid being positioned as chavs, as perceived by outsiders. This was evident when Abby and Annie responded to the picture of the group of boys discussed earlier.

Abby:

They look kind of cheap. Chavvy. […]

Annie:

‘Cause they’re wearing, like, tracksuit bottoms, hats, things like that, like tracksuit tops. But I sometimes wear them. […]

Abby:

That’s the fashion for boys innit.

Annie:

They got different stuff on. They’ve got Nike, Adidas … 

Annie and Abby:

McKenzie … 

Annie:

All in one.

Author:

Alright, they’re kind of mixing [brands]?

Annie and Abby:

Yeah.

Author:

So you should have everything by the same brand?

Annie and Abby:

Yeah.

The boys’ streetwear-based clothing style is denigrated as ‘cheap’ and ‘chavvy’, as Abby puts it. Both interviewees, however, embody elements of what we have called the local style and Abby acknowledges that she wears the same type of clothes as those she denigrates as chavs. But she claims that, unlike the chav boys, she follows the fashion, that is, local style practices, which means to stick to one brand in your outfit, rather than mix brands. Thus, the interviewees made a finely tuned distinction between ‘chavvy’ and fashionable consumption styles; a distinction that may not always be drawn by outsiders. It may be noted, however, that young people appropriating the local style commonly mixed clothes of different brands.

Tattoos are another example of how the chav figure positioned the local style. As mentioned earlier, tattoos were popular among participants. Some interviewees wanted to get tattoos of the names or faces of loved ones. They were conceived as ‘inscriptions of love’ (Back 2007) by many of the young people in this place. The significance of tattoos as embodied expressions of love is deeply embedded in British white working-class culture (Back 2007). For Katie, this created particular tensions.

Katie:

I’d have family. … I’d have my mum’s name [as a tattoo]. But not in a chavvy way, [instead I would] like [to have her] name in Hebrew.

Author:

What’s a chavvy way to have [a tattoo]?

Katie:

To have ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ on a tattoo.

Author:

But in Hebrew?

Katie:

In Hebrew.

In Katie’s account, the value imbued in tattooing the name of a loved one conflicts with her denigratory views of chavs. While she wants to inscribe the name of her mother on her skin, she recognizes this as a ‘chavvy’ practice. To resolve this contradiction, she wants to have her mother’s name tattooed in Hebrew instead of English. In this way, Katie would avoid being positioned as a chav while maintaining her wish to tattoo the name of her beloved mother. To reject this practice could be painful for Katie as she would have to break with a deeply emotional and historically rooted tradition practiced in the area. It is hard to distance oneself, because one fundamentally is this place; one cannot distance oneself from oneself. This is most clearly noticeable in the cases of tattoos – stylistic elements inscribed on the body. At a more general level, this means that actors are partly constituted by others and by taken-for-granted institutions (Heidegger 2001a). The participants should not be interpreted as engaging in subcultural forms of distinction, such as those between authentic and inauthentic styles (Hannerz 2015). And unlike the young people in Nayak and Kehily’s (2014) research, they did not construct alternative meanings around ‘chav’ differing from those diffused in the public realm. Rather, their resistance to chav style should be interpreted as an instance of dissociation, which working-class people may display when positioned as lacking in taste and respectability (Rimmer 2010; Sayer 2005), which, as argued above, is just a different mode of showing the constitutive relations between actors and place. It was much easier for the participants to distance themselves from the ‘chav’ label on a discursive level than on the practical level of style consumption. One reason for this is that they lived in and, in a deeper sense, were constituted by this place. Young people who dissociated from chavs might still be positioned as chavs living in a ‘chav town’ by outside observers. Thus, even if they did not embrace the ‘chav’ label, a number of participants held the public notion that many chavs – some of whom they knew – resided in Satellite Town. This symbolic and spatial proximity to chav style could cause tensions for them, as they sometimes identified with stylistic markers associated with chavs while simultaneously distancing themselves from this practice. We suggest, then, that the tensions and ambivalence in the young Satellite Town residents’ association of Satellite Town with chavs while dissociating from this label is evidence of the strong interrelation between place, style consumption and collective identity markers.

Concluding discussion

We have combined two central insights, the phenomenological idea that people are inherently social – that is, constituted in relation to others – and the great insight of geography that space matters by developing a relational approach both in theory and in empirical fieldwork. To be concrete, the meaning of place, typically the related ‘here’ and ‘there’, is the starting point, not physical distance. The present text’s theoretical contribution is to show how to make a radical break with the Cartesian subject-space idea and instead to propose an ontological relational approach based on Heidegger. This relational perspective means that ‘space’ and ‘being’ are more closely related and that space and place are not seen as independent ‘categories’. This dissolves some of the remaining boundaries between geography and sociology. It points also to the importance of doing qualitative research to identify the empirical concretization of the ontological relation. The full consequences, however, cannot be dealt with here, given the limited space available.

Our empirical analysis shows that place, consumption style and consumers’ identities are partly constitutive of one another. The paper provides evidence of how consumption of lifestyle, and more specifically styles of clothing, by people in Satellite Town, through practices of association and dissociation, constitute the meaning of style, actors and place for those living there and for those observing this place. The external power – here seen as partly creating a stigma (Goffman 1968) for those living in Satellite Town – may be strong and the ‘ascribed’ meaning and value of the practices labelled ‘chavvy’ are largely created by others – for example, bloggers and the media – even though the practices, including the consumption and display of style, are local and place-based.

Clearly, our analysis must be seen as related to the socio-economic and class conditions that structure and limit the opportunities of the people concerned. Class has always been associated with certain consumer practices (for example, Bourdieu 1984), but our point is that certain styles, among many that are available, are associated with certain places. More generally, the point we are making is not only about chavs and Satellite Town at the time of the study but also about the more generic relationship between place and consumption that can be identified at different places and at different points in time. A question for further exploration is whether or not the concentration of style practices in online spaces are a consequence of the active engagement of individuals, as well as affected by the algorithms used in, for example, search engines.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for comments from Johan Jansson, Petter Bengtsson, James Patterson and members of the Uppsala Laboratory of Economic Sociology and the Seminar of Sociology at the University of St. Gallen, as well as the helpful comments by the two anonymous reviewers and the editor of the journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names of individuals and locations have been anonymized.