This thesis will examine the `Chav' subculture in order to establish a new contribution to subcultural critical theory. It will also establish the cultural shift when `Chav' was created. As a prominent British stereotype since 2003, Chavs have received a limited amount of discussion within academia and this thesis will address this issue. While this lack of academic coverage leaves much of the pertinent theoretical ground untraced, it also provides an academic niche within which 1 can work. Using a multi-disciplinary methodology this thesis will examine Chavs through both its discursive representations and its lived identity structures. The first six chapters cover a literature review and then the discursive fields of language, social policy, mass media representations, public space and subcultural style. The next two chapters look at the lived social structures of class and masculinity, and race and ethnicity. The thesis concludes with the exploration of a new theoretical model for youth formations. This model is based upon a cyclical system that perpetually repeats itself through stages of publically defining an inherent lack, public crystallisation of these lacks, demarcation of these discourses upon the subject and public castigation for bearing these signifiers of lack. The theoretical model created in this thesis has far reaching implications in my field of study due to its closed nature- the cycle continually repeats itself, adding new demarcations of exclusion upon each repetition. This cyclical theoretical system could be applied to another social group as it is dependent upon which types of capital- social, cultural or otherwise -are defined at that moment in time as `wrong'. Consequently, the theoretical framework developed throughout this thesis could represent a significant contribution to the field of critical theory.