It was driven largely by VALS, research done by Stanford Research Institute on new marketing techniques, which has been partially credited for transforming advertising into what we know today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALS
The Adam Curtis film "Century Of The Self" has an excellent exploration of the term "lifestyle" and the context it came from.
I think it's interesting that we commonly use the word "lifestyle" to talk about breaking out of a consumer-driven mindset, when the language itself was developed precisely for marketing to that mindset.
I didn't know that. I first read it here, in HN (not an English speaker) in two senses: "lifestyle business" and as a synonim for something a little less strong than "vice" or "crime": drinking, overeating, "soft" drugs, workaholism...
The funny thing is that it seems to conflate the same slight deviation from the average in the good direction: exercise, healthy food...
The word itself was popularized relatively recently (only a generation ago): http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lifestyle&y...
It was driven largely by VALS, research done by Stanford Research Institute on new marketing techniques, which has been partially credited for transforming advertising into what we know today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALS
The Adam Curtis film "Century Of The Self" has an excellent exploration of the term "lifestyle" and the context it came from.
I think it's interesting that we commonly use the word "lifestyle" to talk about breaking out of a consumer-driven mindset, when the language itself was developed precisely for marketing to that mindset.