Blast from the past: The yuppies of the 1980s
The quintessential figure of the decade was the yuppie (young upwardly-mobile professional), the high-earning 20-30-year-old business executive, lawyer, stockbroker, with the smart car and the brick-sized mobile phone.
If you had it, you flaunted it; it was the era of conspicuous consumption – so brilliantly satirised by Harry Enfield’s odious character, Loadsa Money.
Actor Michael Douglas epitomised the yuppie as Gordon Gekko in the hit movie, Wall Street, a serpentine anti-hero in braces and slicked-back hair, who infamously proclaimed: “money never sleeps.”
Although more of a familiar sight swigging champagne in swanky London wine bars and high-end New York sushi bars, Northern Ireland had its own braying urban tribe of yuppies, who’d push past you in a Paul Smith suit while heading to their ridiculously well-paid job.
Yuppie women wore any kind of tight-fitting ‘power” suit – as long as it had big shoulder pads, and an even bigger price tag.
The term yuppie was synonymous with all that was greedy and grasping about Thatcher’s Britain and, with their you-snooze-you-lose attitude, they were for the most part despised. But yuppies themselves didn’t give a flying Filofax what anyone else thought.