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June 12, 2015 at 04:29 AM
Almost a decade ago, there was a hullabaloo about “metrosexuals,” a certain type of young adult male who would clean up very well, sometimes taking longer than women to get ready, and who even got manicures. Then, came a longer lasting “type” of young adult that women also embraced: the hipster.
Largely parodied, often frowned upon, the hipster evolved from a tech adulator in the early 2000s (mostly Apple tech products, of course) to a bearded beer connoisseur. This evolved speciman was a grandpa-sweater and beanie-wearing young adult, a lover of all things not-mainstream.
This “type” of millennial, who is imagined to live a specific bohemian-like lifestyle, has lasted in the collective imagination of our cultural society for almost 10 years. But everything changes, and it seems hipsters have given way to a new “type” of young adult. Enter the “Young Urban Creative” or “yuccie” (and, yes, that sounds like yucky).
An article published in Mashable this week — and Reddit was fast to claim that this article is the first to coin the term “yuccie” — explains that the hipster is dead and the yuccie is the next incarnation that is supposed to take over the millennial population.
The author of the article felt insulted when called a “hipster,” and so he recast himself as a yuccie, or “a slice of Generation Y, borne of suburban comfort, indoctrinated with the transcendent power of education, and infected by the conviction that not only do we deserve to pursue our dreams; we should profit from them.”
He theorizes that the yuccies are the cultural offspring of hipsters and yuppies, a new breed of young adults driven by success (and money), while staying true to being creative, like hipsters. He says that a yuccie combines yuppies’ love of money with hipsters’ love of individualism (being creative and different) and a dash of “millennial entitlement.”
Yuccies hate gentrification, but love artisanal donuts, he writes, and I can’t help but imagine a sarcastic smile forming across his face at the time.
So what does this mean for you? I’m not writing a call to action here, or saying that you should immediately start marketing to yuccies. I’m simply raising a flag about certain lifestyle characteristics that you can appeal to when reaching millennials, although they might seem conflicting.
