© BMW Group
Engines Of Change
How BMWs Became A Status Symbol
Soccer moms weren’t the only Americans in the late 1980s and the 1990s more or less defined by their automobile. There were also the yuppies. The term stood for “young urban professionals,” a new generation of adults with high-paying jobs in business, finance, medicine, law, and the like.
After the word “yuppie” was coined around 1980, it gave rise to such derivatives as buppies (black urban professionals) and guppies (gay urban professionals). There were more to come. Many yuppies enjoyed spendthrift lifestyles in the early years of their marriages because they were DINKs, which meant Double Income, No Kids. As time went by and one spouse traded his or her career (usually hers) for homemaking, some free-spending DINKs became ORCHIDs: One Recent Child, Hideously In Debt. ORCHIDS sometimes became the SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Marriage. So went the alphabet-soup sociology of the day.
Yuppies, distinguished not only by their age and their occupations, were people who had to buy to live, just as sharks had to swim to breathe. But they couldn’t buy just ordinary stuff. Theirs was a restless and creative materialism, a constant search to find the most distinctive and expensive version of just about anything. They favored $2 Dove Bars over 50-cent Eskimo Pies. Their beer was Anchor Steam instead of Budweiser. They chose Macallan single malt over J&B, Camembert over Kaukauna Club, Air Jordans over sneakers, Starbucks over Dunkin’ Donuts, Perrier and San Pellegrino over tap water. And so on. By buying upscale versions of everything, they separated themselves from the unenlightened, the uneducated, and the unwashed. And they were proud of it.
Yuppie pride surfaced one night in the late 1980s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when four young friends went out for a beer. After a couple rounds, one of them, a software developer, blurted out, “Listen, I get up in the morning, put on my French-cut suit, climb into my BMW, and drive to my high-tech job. Now, I ask you, what do I have in common with you people?” Not much after that outburst, as it turned out.
Just being expensive wasn’t enough to make something an object of yuppie desire. It had to be the right kind of expensive. Yuppies needed stuff different from what their parents had owned. In the case of cars, their parents had coveted Cadillacs as yuppies were growing up. But few things were more offensive to yuppie sensibilities than Cadillacs with vinyl roofs and wire wheels. “The sort of person who buys a BMW would rather be force fed Velveeta cubes than drive a Cadillac,” the Los Angeles Times observed in 1987, when it reported on “The New Status Seekers in the 1980s.”
Yuppie gear had to provide benefits, real or imagined, beyond the comprehension of the hoi polloi but knowingly appreciated by the cognoscenti. In 1987 BusinessWeek reported on the booming sales of high-priced pet food. Many yuppies indulged their cats (Himalayans or Bengals, no doubt) with haute cuisine called Amoré and Fancy Feast instead of (sniff, sniff) Purina Cat Chow. It was what “you might expect from BMW aficionados,” the magazine explained.
BMW’s image makers complained about the characterization, but it was like trying to punch holes in Jell-O (a substance, like Velveeta, that never passed through yuppie lips). So what if a few yuppies liked Saabs, Volvos, and Mercedes-Benzes? Nothing came close to defining the young affluents of the 1980s and 1990s like their BMWs. Crashing into a BMW, went one joke of the day, was “vehicular yuppie-cide.” In 1985 a group of young San Franciscans threw a “Yuppie cotillion” that they publicized with the unauthorized use of the BMW logo, declaring that it stood for “Beauty. Money. Wealth.” The suggested dress for men was black tie with Nikes.
Such affectations defined yuppies as “bourgeois bohemians,” in the words of David Brooks, author and New York Times columnist. He shortened the term to “Bobos.” They had mastered the oxymoronic art of being downscale elitists, somehow blending the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of WASP and hippie cultures, of high-church music and grunge rock, to form the new American establishment. One Midwestern yuppie was so taken by the term that he even named his dog Bobo. (The dog was a dachshund, a
breed developed in Germany, just like BMWs.)