Yuppie Culture

 

The figure of the “yuppie” – the young, urban, rising mobile professional – provided the iconic representation of the ambitions, tensions and anxieties that branded American socioeconomic life. The dramatic economic growth of the 1980s sparked the Yuppie craze with their close attention to symbolic capital, fashion, design and the quality of urban life. A yuppie’s crucial status symbol was their cultural commodities rather than consumer products. Yuppies started the obsession with mass materialism and they appeared to be disliked but non-yuppies wanted to be like one. There does appear to be a heavy dislike for the connotations that come with the figure of the yuppie. There was in fact a “yuppie backlash” by people who fitted the typical profile and yet expressed resentment of the label because this class of people put off having families so they could make the payments on their flashy cars and eventually being a yuppie was a hateful and undesirable creature.

The picture shows a hippie maturing into a yuppie who typified the materialism they had previously rejected. The juxtaposing images display how the hippies of yesteryear turned into the yuppies of the 80s. The two men displayed in the picture couldn’t be more different by comparison. As you can imagine hearing the hippie expressing his feelings of “making love, not war!” and the yuppie asking for a “double tall non-fat latte with sugar free vanilla,” it interesting to note how quickly the hippies of yesteryear quickly sold out and completed their natural cycle life making way for the yuppie-ness of the 80s.