Chaps

You must remember heading down to Chaps as a kid, right? Of a Saturday. It used to be rammed back in the old days. This was, of course, if you lived in Rockford Hills, Los Santos. Which you didn’t, as it’s not real.

The sign for Chaps is fully visible, atop the building on the corner of Abe Milton Parkway and Eastbourne Way. Funnily, it looks like the type of shop you would see in the real Eastbourne. Regional. Eastbourne’s nothing if not regional. By which I mean a shithole. Joking. It’s fine. It’s just like every other seaside town in England: big on day-trippers, old people and youths in shell suits that want to stab you.

Away from the south coast, the shop appears to be menswear – chaps being odd, bottomless trousers that members of the Village People adorn. Obviously the word ‘chap‘ has significance in the English speaking world outside of America, being slang for ‘man’. So you would assume clothes for blokes.

The design…well, yellow doesn’t really feature in the original. I added that myself. I just kind of thought of Caterpillar (the construction lads, not the butterfly larval stage lads). You know, foundries, mining, losing several fingers in assorted heavy-duty machines…standard masculine pursuits.

The logo does feature that embossed effect thing. Which I can tell you is surprisingly annoying to recreate.