Research: Burberry

I've started doing some research into different elements of 'chav culture' for our documentary project. The first topic I chose to research was that of Burberry, a clothing label often associated with chavs. This is what I found so far...

Burberry

Burberry was founded in 1856 by Thomas Burberry, a draper’s apprentice in Basingstoke. He created a durable fabric called gabardine, and opened his own store to sell his clothes.

By 1914, the Burberry raincoat was standard kit for British Army officers and the distinctive check used to line the inside of their garments was registered as trademark in 1924. In the 1960s the check became a fashion statement in its own right.

The Burberry baseball cap was launched in 1997 in a successful attempt to re-brand the company’s ageing image into something cool.

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.

At the height of its popularity with the ‘chav’ market, Burberry argued that the brand’s popular association with this new audience was linked to counterfeit versions of the clothing. “It was mostly counterfeit,” said Stacey Cartwright, CEO of Burberry. “Britain accounts for less than 10% of our sales anyway.”

However, this didn’t stop venues in the UK imposing dress-code bans on anybody wearing the label as the image had become increasingly associated with antisocial behaviour.

The company has taken a number of steps to distance itself from the stereotype. In 2004, Burberry ceased production of its own branded baseball cap, and began to scale 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.

Burberry has also taken legal action against high-profile infringements of the brand.

Sources: Wikipedia | Independent

(x-posted to jo coulson's uca blog)