For the “baby-boom” generation of the 1980s and 1990s, the figure of the “yuppie” – the young, urban, upwardly mobile professional – served as an iconic representation of the aspirations, tensions, and anxieties that characterized American socioeconomic life. The economic growth of the 1980s, and in particular the boom in financial markets and services, led to what David Harvey has identified as “a whole new Yuppie culture … with its accoutrements of gentrification, close attention to symbolic capital, fashion, design, and the quality of urban life.” Although yuppies represented only a fraction of the overall population of “baby boomers” born in the postwar era, they exercised an inordinate influence on cultural patterns of the 1980s and 1990s, both through their own buying power and through their influence on a larger number of would-be yuppies who attempted to imitate aspects of their lifestyles and consumption patterns.

For yuppies and pseudo-yuppies alike, the most important status symbols were cultural commodities rather than consumer products. Yuppies were urban rather than suburban in lifestyle and orientation, and they were generally well informed about current trends in culture and the arts.