Are Gen Z wrong to romanticise working class culture on TikTok?

Along with a specific subset of behaviours and particular working class communities, chavs were also known for their aesthetic. Adidas tracksuits, Fred Perry polos, Juicy Couture joggers, Burberry check caps, Ellesse, and even Stone Island — back when it wasn’t so extortionately priced.

The very mention of those brands in 2024, though, brings up an entirely different mental image to that of 20 years before. At some point in the past few years, chav, with all its working class connections, stopped being a term of fear and derision, and started being an aesthetic adopted by anyone with a minor interest in fashion. From influencers like Anastasia Karanikolaou and Victoria Villarroel who partnered with Kappa (the brand once chiefly associated with Matt Lucas’s character Vicky Pollard in Little Britain) to models like Bella Hadid repping the all-over Burberry nova check look, exactly as Eastenders star Daniella Westbrook did in 2008 — except to a vastly different reception.

Di Martino argues that this resurgence in the aesthetic may be part of a “counter narrative,” — Gen Z going against the grain, almost like being punk in the 80s. “While previous generations of working class people tried to blend into the middle class, [the] chavs [of the early 00s] always glorified remaining apart — not conforming,” she explains. Two decades on from its more unappealing associations, perhaps this ‘working class aesthetic’ is becoming a symbol of rebellion against the hyper-capitalist perfection of the 2010s era.

If Di Martino is right, is that a problem? At least the TikTokkers in their Stone Island garb, making 20 second-long videos in London pubs are stopping those pubs from closing down, says Ian McIntosh, owner of the Instagram page Dead London pubs. McIntosh, a veritable pub expert, explains: “I'm a lover of pub preservation. And I think we should be visiting the pub as much as possible, especially in these kinds of trying times.” 

But it’s not just any kind of pub these TikTokkers are frequenting, it’s old, classic, pubs. The kind of pubs where old men sit at the bar for hours on end and there was once a working fireplace. “It is definitely a specific kind of pub they are in love with at the moment. It’s a traditional aesthetic, 1970s, maximal colour, leather banquettes, carpeted.” He says that it may be a reaction to the “elder millennial aesthetic,” of pubs, like BrewDog, “which was very bare and minimal. Chalkboards with no pound signs.”

Yet many commenters simply don’t see it that way. “Why do you hate London? Gestures broadly at this video,” says one. “Rah this is me and my friends cosplaying working class chaps,” accuses another. “Nice costumes,” “I hate you all,” they continue. The comments under posts by Norman’s cafe have a similar energy. Under a post of a chip butty, Instagram users cried: “Working class cosplay,” and “Poshos love to pretend they’re working class.”

21-year-old Emily Corne, who is a working class editor at a technology company, agrees. It feels uncomfortable seeing people “playing up” as her in London pubs and TikTok videos, she says. “Yes, part of it is due to trends, but those trends are inherent to working class culture. [Posing as working class] is definitely becoming stylish, but very selective parts of it,” she explains. “It’s this really beautified, aestheticised view of it. Like the brands they wear now were cheap when I was growing up, my dad used to wear them because he could afford them. Even ‘thrift shopping,’ we did that because we had to, they do it out of choice. I need to wear these clothes and go to these places [pubs, greasy spoons] out of necessity because I can’t afford to go to nicer places, and people are instead choosing to do that. It really does make me angry.”

To Corne, the problem comes down to the fact that poverty is being reduced to an aesthetic, something that is planned and constructed. Activist and writer Joseph Todd blames it on the middle classes losing all sense of identity, leading them to gobble everyone else’s up instead. “London’s middle class are in crisis — they feel empty and clamour for vitality,” he wrote in ROAR magazine back in 2015, “Their work is alienating and meaningless, many of them in ‘bullshit jobs’ that are either socially useless, overly bureaucratic or divorced from any traditional notion of labour.”

He continues: “But thankfully capital has an antidote. Just as in Titanic, when Kate Winslet saps the life from the visceral, working class Leonardo DiCaprio, middle-class Londoners flock to bars and clubs that sell a pre-packaged, commodified experience of working class and immigrant culture. Pitched as a way to reconnect with reality, experience life on the edge and escape the bureaucratic, meaningless, alienated dissonance that pervades their working lives.” In other words: Pints, chit chat, good people.

So perhaps it is all working class appropriation, or perhaps the cost of living crisis is forcing the middle classes into a working class of their own, and they just don’t know what to do with themselves. Drowning, they imitate a fashionable past struggle. It’s not chic to be poor, but these days it is chic to look it. 

It annoys people, because if there’s one thing Gen Z has an eye for, its authenticity. Just as they’re the only generation who have any hope of eyeballing whether something is AI or not, they can tell when you’re posing, and when you’re legit. But now the boundaries are blurring, the young working-to-middle classes need to find an aesthetic of one’s own. Because right now, all they know is how to imitate the past.