Yuppies!

The young urban professional is iconic of the 80's as the trend or at least the branding of the yuppie presumably began in the 80's and systematically came to an end in the 1980's with the wall street crash in 1987, at least that is the point the article i have found considers to be the date of death for the young urban professional as after this point the Gordon Gecko lifestyle was not as preferable.

The yuppie in the 80's came to represent many things, the most obvious being the high flying, fast paced, cocktail and cocaine fuelled urgency of urban life, where spa treatment and facials were ‘cool’ and working life was so hectic and dynamic that wearing running shoes with a business suit was absolutely necessary. The role of the yuppie in the 80's was simply to live the life of excess and indulgence that 'every American' strived for, or at least that’s what the yuppies thought. The yuppies self-branded themselves as the astute few who were prepared to take on the world or die trying where even their day job was a constant risk.

"There is not a single sentence in The Yuppie Handbook that could make you chuckle. By now, the entire manuscript comes across as nothing more than a rote annotation of urbane American life"

However the article i have chosen to look at in researching the yuppie is keen to point out that while the above characteristics of the yuppie were so prevalent in the 80's, not much has really changed since, although the term yuppie has faded along with the idea of wearing running shoes with a full suit, the yuppie lifestyle lives on and is now nothing more than normality for many middle class Americans. The article suggests that the self-indulgent yuppie was so revered among their peers and mocked by others was because at the time the Yuppie was living a lifestyle most Americans could not afford. The article suggests that as the average income of the middle class American has risen since the demise of the yuppie, the indulgences and frivolities of the yuppie have become almost sheer monotony in the 21st century, the article suggests that getting a spa treatment and hosting a cocktail party is no more out of place or excessive now than a gigantic cell phone in the 80's. One of the articles main arguments for this assimilation of the yuppie is the idea that if you read the yuppie handbook today very little is out of place in the modern urban American's life, the same lifestyle the author of the article leads. Furthermore the article suggests that the yuppie has simply evolved rather than disappeared into many different forms of modern yuppie.

"Instead, what we have is a vast and diverse spectrum of yuppiness: guppies, buppies, alt-yups, schlub-yups, dharma-yups, crypto-yups."

http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/200611/the-return-of-the-yuppie?currentPage=1