The Death of the Yuppie. (Finally.)

“I remember exactly the germ of the idea,” Crimmins told me in 2003. “My boss was getting divorced. She’d been married to a high-powered executive in New York. And he said he had to leave her because she wasn’t ‘fast-track’ enough for him. I didn’t even know what fast-track was. All this language was sort of new then: Pencil you in. Interface. Bottom line. All this business language was starting to be used for personal stuff. I remember thinking, ‘There’s this new species that can’t distinguish between business and the rest of their lives.’”

Crimmins nailed the trend, even if she missed laying claim to the naming rights. Her moniker for the new species was “YAPs” — young, aspiring professionals. Within a few months, someone else (it was never quite clear who) coined the term “yuppies,” and for whatever reason, that was the name that stuck.

So who — or rather, what — were these people? One way to define them is simply to string together a list of adjectives that critics have hurled their way: materialistic, pretentious, self-important, self-absorbed, oblivious, obsessed with success. A little harsh? Maybe. But yuppies were typically so smug — look, another adjective! — it’s always been tough to work up much sympathy for them.

Another way to categorize yuppies is to contrast them with who they were determined not to be: their parents, or any other member of the great unwashed. Indeed, at the heart of yuppieness was a deep desire to stand above the rest of the pack — something they tried to accomplish with everything from what they wore and what they ate to what they did for fun and, in time, how they raised their kids. Their message was simple: Yes, I’m superior to you. Just look at this photo of my above-average child, which I took with my Hasselblad camera while we were spending quality time together.

It may be that the best way to define yuppies is to list their possessions — for it was in the things they carried that they defined themselves: shiny black American Express cards, sparkling-white Nikes, BMWs, Rolex watches. A quarter-century later, it would be easier to laugh at these objects — the ’80s incarnations of poodle skirts and pet rocks — if they hadn’t turned out to be the beta versions of all the objects we surround ourselves with today: Viking ranges and Sub-Zero fridges, Range Rovers and Lexuses (hmm, Lexi?), Tory Burch tunics and Balenciaga bags.

Oh, wait, I just accidentally typed a list of Philly Mag advertisers.

Yes, the magazine you’re holding in your hands has made its living catering to yuppies for the past 25 years. But more important, so has the city that gives this magazine its name. We live in a region swaths of which have been built by, for, and in the image of yuppies.

Start with Center City. In the mid-’80s, when I first moved here, our downtown was a dull, grubby place with a few decent restaurants and a lot of homeless people. Today, even in a recession, it’s the location of scores of great places to eat, towering condos and office buildings … and, uh, a lot of homeless people. At the heart of the makeover was Ed Rendell, who ruled over the renaissance for most of the ’90s. It’s tough to peg Rendell himself as a yuppie: One associates a certain degree of fussiness with yuppiedom, and Ed has dripped way too much Cheez Whiz on his ties to ever be lumped in with that lot. But in the way he governed — focusing on things like taxes and tourism rather than schools or the infrastructure — Rendell was happy to salute the yuppie flag.