Young urban professional
4 avril 2009
YUPPIES. Je voulais écrire un papier sur les yuppies et les années 80. Reagan, Wall street et la cocaïne. En cherchant des infos sur le net, j’ai lu un article que l’écrivain américain Jay McInerney a écrit pour le magazine New York. Je vous laisse le plaisir de le lire.
« Like hippies, yuppies were baby-boomers rebelling against their parents. But the yuppies weren’t rejecting their parents’ politics so much as their parents’ taste and budgetary constraints. Yuppies seemed to be apolitical. Urbanity, one of their namesake characteristics, was a reaction to the suburbs, where many of them had grown up. Their epicureanism was presumably a reaction to the canned, frozen, and processed food that most of them had grown up on. As for their signature ambition, well, BMWs and 5,000-square-foot raw loft spaces didn’t come cheap, even in 1984. But of course there was more to it than that, even in the cartoon version, since the self-improvement ethic extended to the physical realm as well. It’s hard to believe now, but there weren’t all that many gyms in Manhattan in 1979 ». Extrait de l’article Yuppies in Eden.
En 1991, le magazine Time a décrété la mort des yuppies avec un nécrologie fausse et une chronologie du phénomène. A partir de l’apparition du mot, en 1983, quand c’était juste une façon nouvelle d’appeler les preppies, jusqu’à sa disparition tragique huit ans plus tard, suite à la récession économique des années 90.
« The causes of death were family, finances and fatigue. (…) Since early 1983, when the term first appeared in print, more than 22,000 magazine and newspaper articles have featured the word yuppie. (…)The yuppie mystique was built around a sense of generational entitlement that had its roots in the prosperity of the 1950s and ’60s. (…) 1991: Yuppies are once again pronounced dead on the arrival of the recession». Extrait de l’article The Birth and – Maybe – Death of Yuppiedom.