In the late 1970s and 1980s, a new breed arrived in New York and other cities. Educated and ambitious, they took jobs in corporate law and finance, earning big salaries, as much of the middle class foundered.
They sought out then-exotic foods like sun-dried tomatoes and balsamic vinegar. They bought designer clothes and high-end electronics. They exercised.
The media labeled them “yuppies,” short for young urban professional, and tended to characterize them as shallow and materialistic.
Dylan Gottlieb, an assistant professor of history at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., spent years researching this cohort for “Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers and Gourmands Who Conquered New York,” published recently by Harvard University Press.
“We live in the world we inherited from them,” he said. “Gourmet food, the meritocratic rat race, the presumption of physical fitness and wellness, the idea that our elite will be more diverse. All of these things, I argue, are the inheritance of yuppies.”
As his detailed study makes clear, Gottlieb, 39, is at home in the world of census data and economic statistics. In this interview, he shrugged off the strictures of social science to discuss the tribe more freely.
“Die, yuppie scum” was once commonly hurled at gentrifiers. How widely is the word “yuppie” understood or even used today?
There’s a generational divide when I give talks. Millennials and older are familiar with the term in its original vintage. But Gen Z has not heard the term. Or they’ve heard it and didn’t know it had a real origin. Once they learn it, they’re like, Oh, finally — a useful term to make sense of the finance bros who are swarming the neighborhoods downtown.
What object was the ultimate yuppie symbol?
The shoulder pad.
I would have said a BMW.
The shoulder pad signifies perhaps the most important change in the cultural depictions of the yuppies: Women stormed the corner office. They do it, though, on masculine terms. Women are expected to remake themselves to fit the demands of an 80-hour workweek. If you’re going to make it, you need to strap on the masculine-seeming shoulder pad suit that Sigourney Weaver wore in “Working Girl.”
Do you have a favorite yuppie film?
My favorite is “Baby Boom.” Diane Keaton is a hard-charging management consultant. Harold Ramis plays her investment-banker boyfriend. They’re classic yuppies. But a baby is thrown into her lap from a long-lost cousin. What it does is expose the contradictions for upwardly mobile women: Oh, you want to have it all? That hard-charging life you had is impossible once motherhood is thrust into your lap.
When I think of onscreen yuppies, I picture James Spader.
It’s too perfect, but he, in fact, is in “Baby Boom.” He’s iconically yuppie in his appearance and the roles he plays. But, importantly, he’s subordinate to Diane Keaton in the office. The WASPs of midcentury are being supplanted in this era, first by white ethnic men — Jews and Italians — and then by women and people of color who join them in the professional world.
Who is a cultural figure we wouldn’t immediately peg as a yuppie?
Perhaps the most famous one of all is Barack Obama. He represents the apotheosis of this meritocratic climbing that was impossible 20 years before. I have this photo I use in talks where he’s holding the scepter at the center of this group photo of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. That’s a signal accomplishment, that a Black man could on his strengths of character and talent rise to that position.
He meets Michelle when he’s working in Chicago at a big corporate firm. They’re the new face of the yuppie power couple. And, of course, his taste — he’s always trying to show off his good taste, which is such a hallmark of yuppiedom. You want to demonstrate you can go high, you can go low and omnivorously consume.
We think of yuppies living the good life. But your book portrays the grinding hours in sterile offices. One law associate begins his job and has dinner with his wife on a weekday three times in the next three years.
In the gentlemanly world of the 1950s and ’60s, lawyers billed about 1,600 hours a year in New York. By the mid ’80s, if you wanted to make partner at a firm like Skadden, it’s 2,500. They’re sort of miserable. Consumption is one way to salve this discontent. But it often isn’t enough. That’s one reason they’re doing so much cocaine. You’ve worked 12 hours and you get a chance to go out. It’s 1 a.m., and you want to go to Limelight. You need to maximize your consumption hours after maximizing your working hours. It’s very different from the euphoric LSD of the ’60s.
You write about the yuppie fixation on food and restaurants. Can you make a yuppie dinner menu?
You might start with caviar and blinis. It needs specialized knowledge to consume. It’s vaguely European. You’d probably have a salad with strawberry vinaigrette on arugula or endive — some variety of bitter green as far removed from iceberg lettuce as you can get. In “Baby Boom,” her lunch is free-range chicken with dandelion greens. Maybe tiramisù for dessert. Regional Italian cuisine that is not red sauce would fit perfectly. And, certainly, Perrier.
Are today’s matcha drinkers and marathon runners yuppies?
There’s a downwardly mobile tranche of us out here — the precariat, we might say — who share the tastes and cultural capital of a fine education but no longer the economic capital. They’re prioritizing their yoga class or $10 smoothie, but they can’t go on the ski vacation, or they’ll never afford an Upper West Side apartment.
These tastes have become democratized. You can buy sushi made in your grocery store in Tennessee. It doesn’t mean we’re all yuppies. Some of us earn enough — and some of us don’t.
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