Being seriously rich is now 'in' for British youth

Press, 11 June 1987, Page 8

Being seriously rich is now 'in' for British youth

These days in London it's all six-figure City salaries at 23, and name your Porsche, says social commentator PETER YORK, in the “Observer.”

The shadow of the City now hangs heavy on the nation’s youth. It started well before Big Bang. Bright kids, sharp kids, boys and girls who dressed well, talked well, had done most of the options on the London social round — meaning serious black tie tonight and a warehouse party tomorrow — these kids would look you in the eye and say they planned to go into the City.

The City was cool because it paid cool young people like themselves hot money.

They’d all heard; $300,000 plus at 23 and name your Porsche.

And Emma could still dress as Edie Sedgwick and put on her hip-hop stuff in the new Clapham duplex, provided she toned it down as Miss Next in meetings at the bank. By 1986, the Sloane/City language — “seriously rich” for stinking, for instance — had percolated into the world. 1986 was the year when “Business” magazine was launched, and became Magazine of the Year straight away. 1986 was the year of the business celebrity. Cityland, moneyland, designland; they all synthesised in a new way in the world of “Business.” And the world of “Business” was the same, quite literally, as the “World of Interiors,” where an antique curtain tassel could cost a couple of hundred. Seriously rich. Seriously cool. But if the City was cool, where did that leave all the Alternative lands of care and creativity? (“I want to work with people,” "I want to direct.”) In a time gone by, young friends used to complain that they would be better employed in the 8.8. C. in journalism, in musicland (a key Yuppie area in the early Eighties). No longer. Now they assume that their university friends currently in brokers or banks earn three times what they do. And have more fun. ’'

This pure money drug leads to snobbism. Reactionary chic now rules in 1987.

1986 was the year in which the outfitters Hackett’s (instant Sloane) conquered all young hearts in SW3, 6,7, 10, 11 and 12. At a national level, Next for Men (instant Yuppie) with its cooled-out, brushed-up imagery of Power Dressing for success became the crucial mass influence in menswear.

1986 was the year when British media started to cover Yuppies (two and a half years after the U.S.). Even the “Sunday Mirror” had a centre spread of City girls last year, all money and cars and V.D.U.S.

Last year was the year that designer group Body Map (written up as Swinging London Part II in 1984) flopped, and fickle airheads in their end-of-year, In and Out round-ups said that style magazines — the A-Zs of the New Alternative London — were out.

And 1986 was when the journalist Nicholas Coleridge created, almost single-handed, in "Harpers and Queen” and v the “Spectator,” a mythological world of incredibly rich, lucky, clever, well-bred young City folk.

If one can go for it and have it all — serious money, serious style with every tassel in place and serious classiness — then where does that leave the Alternative, particularly if the Alternative has no definable moral or ideological content?

As the Alternative has actually been a pretend Success Culture too — one of pure style — then who is to say the young shouldn’t choose the Lloyd’s building over the 1.C.A.; “Business” over "Blitz” and Whites over the Wag?

And some people, so it seems, don’t even have to choose, since they can have what the other, Alternative folk have too (what’s yours is mine). And does Neil Kinnock worry them? Only fitfully.