Young upwardly-mobile professionals became both models and targets as baby boomers met the affluence of the Reagan years. The epithet makes ironic reference to preppies (a middle-class buttondown style associated with but not exclusive to prep schools), whom yuppies assimilated, and hippies, whom yuppies, in some cases, had been in earlier incarnations. This ambiguous class term has been defined by patterns of consumption rather than wealth, power, or ethnicity; often, its connotations seem too negative for selfattribution.

Other related terms—buppies (black), guppies (gay), chuppies (Chinese)— reveal questions of diversity and spreading wealth.