£400 Gucci T-shirts and £26 workout classes – why Gen Z are splashing cash despite living pay cheque to pay cheque

E very Saturday morning when I scroll through Instagram, this is the kind of thing I know I’ll see from my fellow 20somethings. One friend posing in a £400 Gucci T-shirt, clutching an £8 cinnamon bun from the latest must-visit bakery in West London. Another sipping prosecco aboard a rented yacht in Dubai. A third taking a selfie during a Barry’s exercise class (£26), decked out in Alo Yoga kit (£150). The surprise? They’re all living pay cheque to pay cheque.

Welcome to ‘Boom Boom’ culture, where we’re broke but you’d never know it. Boom Boom is 2025’s answer to the 1980s-style propensity for conspicuous consumption. Trend forecaster Sean Monahan (the man who identified ‘normcore’ in 2013) describes it as ‘looking like you’ve spent money for the sake of looking like you’ve spent money’. Just like the Wall Street ‘greed is good’ guys of the 80s, today’s 20somethings are fetishising wealth, even if, beneath the surface, the numbers don’t add up.

At least in the 80s the image of wealth was backed by actual economic growth. Deregulation drove the UK’s booming GDP, and real disposable income rose by 29 per cent over the decade. Home ownership surged, too: whereas around half of people owned their homes in the late 70s, that number had risen to almost 70 per cent by 1990. There was big money sloshing around, and it was spent (and spent and spent). Versace power suits, Ray-Ban Jackie Ohh sunglasses; Louis Vuitton luggage tossed onto Concorde flights. Central to this was the Yuppie, or ‘young urban professional’, determined to flaunt their success, much to the delight of booming luxury brands such as Chanel, Armani and Rolex.

INFLUENCER IN 2025: social-media star Alix Earle (private) jets in to last month’s Coachella festival

Now the aesthetic has returned, even if the economic reality underpinning it hasn’t. Prada’s latest show featured pashmina-sized fur capes, Stella McCartney had exaggerated shoulder pads and Miu Miu showed Madonna-esque pointy metallic bras. Victoria Beckham’s bestselling ‘My dad had a Rolls-Royce’ T-shirt (£110) goes perfectly with Cult Gaia’s £700 purse, shaped like the Monopoly man’s money bag. The consensus is the crasser you’re being about how much money you have, the better.

It’s not only the runway driving this obsession with conspicuous wealth; it’s our social-media feeds, too. Influencers like 24-year-old New Jersey-born Alix Earle, with her seven million TikTok and four million Instagram followers, have set a new standard for performative luxury. When you see her life on a loop every day – Miami pool parties, designer-brand events, front-row fashion week appearances – the line between aspiration and real life blurs. Stars like her set a precedent, and the rest of us desperately try to look filthy rich to keep up.

I’m no innocent bystander. Scroll my Instagram and you’ll see me wearing £3,000 worth of clothes at Glastonbury (£380 a ticket), staying at a £650-a-night Mykonos resort and enjoying VIP concert tickets (£648). My hair is highlighted (£300 every two months), my nails are done (£45 every three weeks), and I recently spent £400 on tattoos that I naturally showed off on Instagram. Boom Boom, baby. My financial reality? At 26 – the age my dad put a deposit down on his first flat – I have less than £2,000 in savings. And next month I’ll be dipping into that to fund flights to a hen do. I can only afford to live the life I do by spending every last penny of my pay cheque each month. I haven’t put money aside for the apocryphal rainy day since I started working. Unless something drastic changes I won’t be buying a home in London without serious parental help. But then nor will anyone else I know.

Because unlike the Yuppies, Gen Z isn’t accumulating wealth. Today’s average 25- to 34-year-old is facing house prices that are 65 times higher than they were 50 years ago, while wages have only grown by 36 times.

In 1989, a record 51 per cent of under-35s owned a home – that’s now halved to around 25 per cent. Most of us have accepted that the milestones young people hit in the 80s – home-owning, marriage, starting a family – will happen much later, or not at all.

YUPPIE IN 1987: 1987’s Wall Street

Take my friend, a Russell Group graduate with two master’s degrees, who earns around £2,000 a month. Her rent and bills are (like everyone else’s in London) more than £1,000. ‘If I budgeted really carefully,’ she says, ‘I could live on £850 a month and save £150. To buy a flat in London, I’d need a £25,000 deposit. So [she spent a minute tapping violently on her phone calculator] I’ll need to save for 13-and-a-half years. By then I’ll be 40. You’re telling me I shouldn’t spend that £150 on fancy dinners, drinks and the occasional holiday to forget this train wreck?’

​Some of my friends are trying to hack the system the old-fashioned way: dating someone rich. Last year, 28-year-old Megan Boni (better known as Girl On Couch) shared on TikTok a clip of herself singing: ‘I’m looking for a man in finance, with a trust fund’. It racked up 60 million likes and was so popular that world-famous DJ David Guetta remixed it. Nearly 20,000 TikTok users – mainly 20something females – commented on how relatable it was. To quote one, it’s a ‘total mood’.

I have one friend who pays £15 a week for the premium version of the dating app Hinge so she can filter out people without a university degree and super-swipe all the investment bankers she comes across. She once cancelled a date with a guy whose profile said he worked at a tech firm as he turned out to be just the social media manager there (and he lived in Zone Five, ie, beyond London). In 2025, the three most attractive things a man can have are a Financial Times subscription, a Loro Piana baseball cap and a flat in Clapham.

Others have taken the more radical route of moving to Dubai. Not for the yachts and weather (though they help), but for the tax-free salaries. A girl I went to school with moved there to become an estate agent. She was smart and very pretty, which, it transpires, is the perfect combination for commission-based work. Five years later, she moved back to the UK, bought a house, and now drives a brand-new £48,000 Range Rover Evoque like everyone else on my Instagram. The difference? She made so much during her five-year stint in Dubai that hers isn’t on credit. 

So yes, we’re spending like we’re rich when we are anything but. But honestly, if you were 26 right now, would you act differently? When actual currency is unobtainable, it’s no surprise that we have substituted it with the social currency that comes from racking up comments on snaps of expensive holidays and £18 cocktails. Instead of a pension and a home, I’m going to end up with Instagram likes and a pair of Balenciaga trainers.

How apt then, that Boom Boom sounds like the punchline to a bad joke.

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