Are boubours a new species?
"After dominating for more than fifteen years, the bohemian bourgeoisie has clearly had its day".recently observed Le Monde and propose the concept of "bourgeois bourrin in short, the boubour to succeed boboreferring to Nicolas Chemla's book, Anthropology of the boubour - named after the famous Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks.
Except that if we confuse the trendy residents of rue Oberkampf with the founders of the New Economy, we run the risk of missing out on ... a change in civilisation!
First of all, let's reassure readers and journalists of the vesper press: the Parisian bobos are doing well, you only have to stroll between the Bataclan and La Maroquinerie to be convinced. They are now swarming in lower Montreuil, on the Croix de Chavaux side, and even at the foot of the Butte Montmartre, a stone's throw from the Porte de Clignancourt.
They are the distant heirs of those "Offbeat which Bernard Cathelat's CCA identified as far back as the 1980s - while the bourbour, of which Donald Trump is a caricature, is a caricature, "A link between Booba and Laurent Wauquiez as underlined by Liberationis reminiscent of "Self-centred from the same period: nothing new under the sun, then.
On the other hand, the Bobos as painted by David Brooks have well and truly disappeared ... along with the New Economy, in fact!
When, after several years spent abroad, the journalist returns to the United States to find that the Bourgeois behave like Bohemians, he is not referring to a "trendy middle class", but to the bosses of Nasdaq-listed companies - those of the New Economy.
What is rejected by the champions of this New Economy is not only the industrial system itself, but also all the values attached to it: hierarchy, possession, appearances. For many entrepreneurs who went to university in the 68s, this was almost the only way they could make a living. "the big night social ...
From now on, people will prioritise a certain quality of life over ostentatious displays of wealth: they'll be more likely to cycle to the office than drive a chauffeur-driven German car, they'll look after their body and mind, and so on. We will claim a lifestyle that until now was more that of the Bohemians.
By Bohemians, we mean ... academics, artists, journalists, philosophers - people who often have the same qualifications as the bourgeoisie, but who prefer quality of life to quantity of bank account.
All this came to an end in April 2000, when the Nasdaq collapsed, taking many hopes with it: and AOL, Netscape and Yahoo were not to survive, more or less in the short term.
The Bobos, Brooks' version, were revolutionaries: they didn't just want to reform an obsolete economic model, they advocated other values, other ways of life; their ambition was to create a new and, above all, better world than the one they had inherited.
But the Boubours, legatees of the Bobos: certainly not!
The real heirs of the Bobos are... the young people of the new generations Y - in part - and Z: they are the ones who are in the process of building a new civilisation where, for example, the current hierarchical structure of companies no longer works; where professional and private life merge in a completely different way to that of the dynamic executive who goes home with his files to finish.
It's fashionable in trendy circles - bobos in the Parisian sense of the term - to feel sorry for these young people who will find it harder and certainly less rewarding to earn a living than their parents: but such thinking is based on the values of these parents... in other words, outdated values.
Like the "true These Bobos, these new generations, prioritise being - and well-being - over appearance: they are building a society which, if not better in absolute terms, will be better ... for them. Come and find out more about the Gen Z subscription study at Adwise: there are already 80 members on our digital platform! www.adwise-research.com
