How to be a Yuppie

Initially I wanted to find evidence of the ‘Yuppie’ in fashion, whether the characteristics of the Yuppie had ever become a fashion statement after the 1980’s. I did not find a specific fashion statement, but instead found a simple easy explanation on ‘How to Make a Male 80s Yuppie Costume’. http://www.ehow.com/how_5512305_make-male-80s-yuppie-costume.html

The website that I found my article on is called ‘ehow.com’, and provides tips on style, health, lifestyle etc. The article describes a yuppie as a ‘Young Upwardly Mobile Professional Person (..) flaunting their money through their fashion’. These were men from their mid twenties to their forties, who like to flaunt their gadgets and talk about their rich, exotic lives.

The article includes a list of four easy instructions, which includes the image of the character of Gekko in Wall Street. In this instruction, Jami Fox mentions the word ‘power suit’, which is commonly connected to the image of a Yuppie. The word ‘power’ is interesting in terms of the 1980’s being a decade of money, people getting out of the depression of the 1960’s and going into the 1980’s feeling confident, getting better jobs and more money, and therefore feeling powerful. I think the term power suit, which is still being used today, particularly in fashion, has a negative idea to it, the idea that money means power, although it is meant to mean happiness, according to the American Dream.

This article was posted last year, yet another year of recession since December 2007. The Yuppie was the icon of the 1980’s, a decade that many remember as being progressive. Somehow the Yuppie has come back into fashion, with luxury goods of modern daytime to ‘recreate’ the Yuppie image. This is the list of ‘Things you need’ for your so-called transformation.

· Suit

· Tie

· Suspenders

· Pressed dress shirt

· Black shoes

· Khaki pants

· Izod Lacoste polo shirt

· Sweater

· Sony Walkman

· Deck shoes

· Steel-banded watch

· BMW keychain

· Vintage cell phone

· Champagne

· Bottle of Perrier

· Burberry coat

The idea, however remains that the look is vintage.

This article shows the representation of the Yuppie in the 1980’s as a memorable, iconic image of wealth, happiness and power. My view of the role of the Yuppie changed after having read the article, not because of the words written but because of what it has become for us. An image. An image that might have had a lot of impact on society in the 1980s, of men having well-paid, important jobs, but just remained an image. I think that the image of the Yuppie might have been more noticeable than the work a Yuppie actually did.