Monsters and Dust

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That his aesthetic not only stayed faithful to but exaggerated his chav roots could point to a lack of imagination, but maybe we’re not giving him enough credit. His pre-lottery devotion to Chav culture and its showy aesthetic suggests an affiliation with drag and performance. If you look chronologically through tabloid pictures of his 18 month binge, he seems bigger, smugger, more playful, to have more gaudy jewelry and more swagger, in each one. His excessive dress and behavior cross a line into at least exhibitionism if not provocative self-invention.

Or maybe he had darker motivations for flouting his brutish persona. Was he intentionally clowning for an audience who he knew had grimly low expectations of him? In his own words, "The press branded me as a lager lout before they'd even spoke to me and I decided to play up to it.” Was he making fun of himself or his audience? Was it conscious provocation, or more self-destruction? Did his sudden access to class mobility activate a fearful resistance to it, causing him to tightly embrace what he had always known, or can we understand his dangerous but playful behavior as the work of a naive performance artist?

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Chavvy McChavChav
Carroll, after
Illustration by Pilar Tena