The new yuppies: They're back - and this time they're green

They may have swapped their Filofaxes and Walkmans for iPods, and drink only ethical coffee, but yuppies - those brash icons of the 1980s - are back. Last month Harper's ran a story announcing the fact under the coverline: "Return of the yuppie... and yes, that probably means you!"

Once upon a time being called a yuppie made 30-something professionals shudder. Yuppie ("Young Urban Professional") was a byword for greed, self-absorption and a lack of a social conscience. The ultimate cliché was the city banker in red braces - remember Gordon Gekko in Wall Street?

These days the yuppie is just as likely to be running an art gallery (White Cube, Frieze), a city PR firm, a TV production company, or an eco-fashion store. Today's yuppies range from kitchen table entrepreneurs to City whizz kids who made their money, and then got out to launch their own charity, website or (ideally) "green" company. Many are so-called "green atoners": affluent types keen to offset guilt with green action.

Yuppies are good at business because they are always ahead of the curve withlifestyle trends. Peter York, who documented the rich in the Eighties and is a columnist for this newspaper, thinks the yuppie has had an unfair press. He reminds me that the term then meant a young city-dweller with a well-paid, professional job and an affluent lifestyle. "The yuppie got confused with the Loadsamoney caricature," he says. "The true yuppie was well educated, smart, young and very ambitious. Often they married each other, so, say, the husband would be in a clever bit of the City, but she might be the registrar of a big hospital who started her own medical supplies business alongside her day job."

Obsession with career was a yuppie hallmark. As The Yuppie Handbook (1984) pointed out, work had to be personally meaningful, emotionally satisfying, and a vehicle for self-expression. Yuppie couples worked long hours, put off having children and had lots of disposable income.

York is not surprised that the new yuppies have moved into IT, advertising, comedy, even the art world. He cites Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, who founded London's Frieze Art Fair: "They are very much part of the cool art world but they have pursued their vision in quite a driven, yuppie way."

Officially, the yuppie died on 19 October 1987, the day the stock market crashed and the Dow Jones lost 22.5 per cent, ushering in a new indie/slacker generation. But as a recent article in the American glossy magazine Details pointed out, your average upwardly-mobile young professional has far outstripped and outclassed the mid-Eighties yuppie.

In boom-town London we again have high-fliers making millions. House price inflation has been in double digits for years, champagne sales exceed300 million bottles a year, and high-end restaurants such as The Wolseley thrive. Goldman Sachs staff ("the haves and have yachts") won a record bonus last year, up 40 per cent on 2005.

Yuppies didn't disappear, they just adapted. "Money didn't go away," says York, "it just got bigger and quieter". And according to Cornell University economist Robert H Frank, the author of Luxury Fever: "People never lost their taste for quality things."

The crucial difference is that today's yuppies make a great display of being green. They invest in ethical clothing and cars, go to farmers' markets and, like David Cameron, have wind turbines on their houses. But of course they still run the London social set. They still live at the right address and draw the right income.

The yuppie is still addicted to consumption: but the labels have changed. Instead of chucking money at Porsches and Rolexes, new yuppies prefer "experiential" pursuits such as travel, talks and art events. They dress differently. Out goes the sharp suit, which to York's chagrin is thought "flash and anachronistic". "Indie yuppies" resemble students or aspiring artists in vintage T-shirts and recycled Terra Plana trainers.

No wonder canny marketers and brand developers have gone into overdrive. Just look at the ads for Adili.com, the "ethical fashion" label: "Save the world," they proclaim, "one little top at a time."

Our supermarket aisles bulge with organic food. The Notting Hill set snap up fair-trade knitwear from People Tree and organic baby clothes from Gossypium. Being green helps "grubby capitalists" feel more virtuous, claims James Delingpole, author of How to be Right: The Essential Guide to Making Lefty Liberals History. "If you wear your green heart on your sleeve at a dinner party, no one is going to question you. It provides you with a moral get-out-of-jail-free card. One: you are a nice person. Two: if you want to get on in politics, it's a very good tactic, as Dave Cameron and his lot have discovered. And three: there is so much fucking money to be made."

In his book, Delingpole dismisses the organic movement as one of the great con tricks of the age. "I was talking to a City analyst who was telling me just how much money he is making from wind farms - only he calls them subsidy farms."

Delingpole compares green yuppies with what he describes as "hippy entrepreneurs", businesspeople such as Ben & Jerry and Anita Roddick who started out quirky and socially conscious then went global. Never trust a hippy, he jokes.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the modern yuppie, is that many of us will recognise ourselves. The Yuppie Handbook listed the things that budding yuppies couldn't live without: gourmet coffee, Burberry trench coat, expensive running shoes, home help, new kitchen with double sink, smoked mozzarella, and Coach bag. Just remember that when you're ordering organic vegetables from Ocado, sipping an Innocent smoothie, or picking out a bright People Tree scarf in Topshop.

NEW YUPPIES

Hass Hassan

Founder of the chic organic food retailer Fresh & Wild, which he set up with Bryan Meehan in 1999. In 2004 he sold the company for around $38m to Whole Foods Market in the US, and became a director of that company in 2005

Safia Minney

Founder of ethical fashion label People Tree, so loved by Sienna Miller and Minnie Driver. Minney's banker husband invested in the firm, which she set up in 2001 to champion organic farming. Last year, People Tree opened a concession in Topshop.

Sharp and Slotover

In 1991, Oxford graduates and business partners Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover set up the art magazine 'Frieze'; 10 years on they launched the Frieze Art Fair, one of the art world's most influential events

Arthur Potts

Potts, a chef, is the nephew of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger. He set up London's first totally green restaurant, Acorn House, with his business partner, Jamie Grainger-Smith, in 2005. All the food is fair trade, and the restaurant uses green electricity and biodegradable products

Alex Michaelis

David Cameron's personal green architect may be giving the Tory leader's home a £1m eco-makeover with a wind turbine and low-flush lavatories, but he is successful enough in his own right to own a five-bedroom subterranean lair in Ladbroke Grove. One of his first projects was Clerkenwell's fashionable Moro restaurant

Clare and Dave Hieatt

Formerly at Saatchi and Saatchi, they set up ethical, Cardiff-based sports range Howies (skateboard and surf wear with radical messages, made of organic cotton and hemp), operating on fair trade principles