January 24th, 2007
The return of the yuppie
According to an article in Details magazine, YUPPIES has returned. Get this it never really disappeared in the first place.
Twenty years after the heyday of that mockworthy monster of American affluence, I have become the enemy. Hi, my name is Jeff, and I am a yuppie. We’re all yuppies now.
Of course, that term, yuppie, has fallen so out of favor that we are not even supposed to use it anymore. We are expected to come up with a neologism - a clever 21st-century inversion of the word. But we are not going to do that, because we don’t need to: The yuppie of 1986 and the yuppie of 2006 are so similar as to be indistinguishable. A used copy of The Yuppie Handbook recently fell into my hands. The book was published in 1984 as a jokey piece of social anthropology, and it made a slew of observations about this new American species. The yuppie’s bizarre lifestyle preferences were intended to elicit populist guffaws. Here are some of the things, according to The Yuppie Handbook, that the budding yupster could not live without: gourmet coffee, a Burberry trench coat, expensive running shoes, a Cuisinart, a renovated kitchen with a double sink, smoked mozzarella from Dean & DeLuca, a housekeeper, a mortgage, a Coach bag, a Gucci briefcase, and a Rolex.
…typing away at a computer while sitting in an ergonomic chair, racking up gobs of debt on his credit card, and - the clincher - eating tuna sashimi for lunch! The mere mention of tuna sashimi for lunch was apparently seen as the height of hilarity back in 1984. A yuppie most nearly approaches sainthood, the book noted, when he or she is able to accomplish more things in a single day than is humanly possible. (This was long before BlackBerries.)
All of which means that the archetypal yuppie of the eighties sounds precisely like, um, everyone you know.
The yuppie is impervious to boom-and-bust cycles. The yuppie disappeared on Black Monday, 19 October 1987 when the stock market crashed. The yuppie was replaced by the "indie/slacker/die-yuppie-scum sensibility" until the mid-1990’s. There was another crash in 2000, and the dot-com bust. And he’s back again.
The author makes a rather good argument - the yuppie phenomenon is the most enduring and influential social movement of the past 50 years. The boomer media hyped up the Woodstock era, but how many real hippies do you know? The only remaining trace of hippie ideology can be found with the sale of organic, farm-raised produce and meats. But the people who are in the whole foods business are yuppies not hippies. The rebels who remain have become commerical by glorifying Apple and advertisements for iPods. No one aspires to be a beatnik anymore.
Yuppie-ism is a vast and diverse spectrum that includes: guppies, buppies, alt-yups, schlub-yups, dharma-yups, crypto-yups. I’m not certain what all of those are or what type of lifestyle statements each of those depict. But its a sure bet this is the underlying characteristic for all of these:
Even back in 1991, novelist Douglas Coupland, the man who introduced the term Generation X into the mainstream, was picking up on a generation’s natural vulnerability to comfort. When you are 27 or 28, your body starts emitting the Sheraton enzyme, he told People. You can no longer sleep on people’s floors. By 37, the Sheraton enzyme mutates into the Four Seasons endorphin. People, like neighborhoods, have a tendency to gentrify. On my recent trip to the West Coast, I went back to the section of Pasadena that used to be my beloved slacker drag strip in the eighties - a scrungy wonderland of pawn shops, Bukowski-approved dives, vintage clothing shops, used bookstores, greasy taco trucks. As I poked around in this, the fall of 2006, it came as a shock to see that every last drop of that suburban boho-scape was now gone, replaced by upscale trattorias and tapas bars, boutiques and Pottery Barn and Tiffany’s.
A shock, but only a minor one. While the yuppies were colonizing my favorite neighborhood, apparently they were doing the exact same thing to my brain.
All of this is sounding more like close to home. This is a loose lifecycle of the yuppie: the boom-and-bust economic cycles dictates the birth and death of this so-called cohort. The next generation of budding yuppies and their preferences in lifestyle and goods can be predicted with some foresight.
The return of the yuppie makes a lot of sense in Seoul. Many of the successful young professionals who were educated abroad have returned home with brand preferences that reflect the global yuppie.
The choice is theirs and the information is clear:
- Cars: Lexus, BMW, Audi
- Men’s fashion: Hugo Boss, Armani
- Women’s fashion: Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada
- Home interior: IKEA (mostly available through the gray market), Ethan Allen, Pottery Barn (again, gray market)
- Luggage: Tumi (available via Duty Free or abroad)
- Food and beverage: body awareness has taken a hold with increase in wine consumption
- Others: LUSH, watching OnStyle
