Symphony in white

Everywhere you go there are white cars: white Golfs, white Peugeots, white Escorts.  And not just any model; always the boy racers, the young professional's car.  These are the white chariots of yuppie desire.

This white mood is clearly part of a generation, not an era.  It is not the late eighties which display this dazzling candour: it belongs to the prime inhabitants of the late eighties.  They are making their distinctive mark, and that mark has no colour.

Which is just as they would wish it.  For above all, they value style, and they value sophistication.  They are a supremely self-aware generation; they are as incapable of the crass naivety of the 60s as they are of the blind nihilism of the 70s.  Unlike those generations they do not judge society; nor do they want to change it, not even from within the citadel.  They do not need to: they are the generation of success, a success so sure of itself that it is self-image not social milieu which counts.

A success of this purity demands an almost religious dedication; they are expert in it, professionals at it.  As befits this band of serious-minded succeeders, they dress for action; they know that you dress for success.  Hence the resurgence of black business suits, suits which say nothing and therefore everything about you.  And along with that severest of tones there is its opposite.  Both transcend mere colour, and instead aspire to intensity.  Both are ciphers - riddles and zeros. 

And just as nothing is stronger than these nothing colours, so nothing is more modern.  Pure black and white are timeless, and therefore of the future.  Which is where all yuppies are heading, because it is there that success awaits them.  Yuppiedom differs from the American Dream because it is real where the other is illusion, and because it is happening now.  The American Dream always happens in the next canyon, or on the next block.

This future love explains in part the yuppies' obsession with technology, their never-ending romance with cellular telephones, with computers, with compact discs.  As well as saying "I am the future, and I am there now", technology is the ultimate yuppie weapon.  The down-and-going older generation is caught on the horns of a dilemma: it is afraid of technology, and knows that it will bring about its downfall.  But it also knows that technology is the future: to deny it is to deny the future, to deny their own future, and hand it to the generation already waiting there for history to catch them up.

The white car is an example of vanishing technology, in the same way that the ever-smaller microcomputer, or the ever-more portable phone is.  The logical limit of technology is its own negation as its power increases to the point where it disappears - the computer on a pinhead.  The white car proclaims its effortless technology at the same time as it effaces itself in empty blankness.  As a marrying of brute power and sleek engineering, as a perfect symbol of the mobility - along rather than up - of the young professional, and as an unarguable monument to having arrived, the white car of the yuppie leaves everything else standing.

(27.8.86)

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