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This is going to make me sound ancient, but when I was a little girl, there was nothing glamorous about yoga. Celebrities didn't do it, or if they did, they didn't discuss their "practices" - Bikram, tantric or otherwise. There were no Lululemon pants or yoga mats in pretty colours or cute bags to go with them. There were no celebrity yoga teachers and no expensive retreats at five-star hotels in the Caribbean. In fact, yoga was so very unglamorous it was the kind of thing done in dingy community-centre basements or on a rug at home in front of the TV along with an earnest, lumpy woman in an ill-fitting leotard on PBS.

But, as we all know, something has happened to yoga, along with all the other pet predilections the boomer generation held in their student days. It has grown up, moved uptown and become as well-heeled and worldly as the boomers themselves.

Right now, within a stone's throw of the busy corner of my midtown Toronto neighbourhood, not one but five haute Indian restaurants have recently opened their doors. No student curry houses, these boast fresh white linens, high-end modern interiors and meticulously described $28 entrees that are "infused" with exotic fruits and spices, rather than dumped into a chrome tub under a heat lamp at the $6 all-you-can-eat buffet. And the same thing has happened with all the other world cuisines originally adopted as wallet-friendly and adventurous by the first generation of student backpackers, from designer Thai to upscale pizza.

That these choices now exist is proof not only of the boomer generation's much-cited and continuing impact on consumer culture, but that tastes themselves can mature and become sophisticated.

In fashion, for instance, it is no coincidence that the "rich hippie" look flourishes season after season, as a vast clientele of now-rich, once-hippie buyers cannot seem to get enough of $3,000 designer caftans, accessorized with "tribal" belts and oversized "ethnic" jewellery. Of course, jeans are no longer simple Levi 501s but designer must-haves, and set you back hundreds. Even vintage has gone couture.

Homes and condos are now furnished in a grown-up version of the boomer's first studio apartment, complete with a high-end, ragtag assortment of "eclectic" and intentionally mismatched pieces. Instead of a reclaimed wooden hydro spool from the trash, coffee tables are reclaimed blocks of teak from the Amazon rainforest. Bathroom tiles and dinner plates are "designer rustic" and the material on a $12,000 sofa comes pre-aged and deliberately worn straight from a French mill.

Forget Florida and Arizona. When these former backpackers go on vacation, they splurge on $50,000 custom family safaris in Kenya and eco-tours in Central America. Instead of bedding down in funky hostels, they rent funky Moorish palaces in Morocco and crumbling Tuscan villas overgrown with vines. And in a well-heeled version of that year after college they spent working abroad on a kibbutz, they "give back" by combining charitable work in a developing country with an exotic family vacation.

The easy response is that all of this is happening because the larger culture is simply giving boomers what they want. But the fact is that fiftysomethings are not the only generation buying into it. There is a new, intergenerational sophistication out there in what were originally rather crude notions of authenticity or worldliness.

Where a creative salad once meant dirty bean sprouts thrown into a sandy bunch of spinach, there is now a mass craving for arugula. White wine, even at openings, is no longer the cheapest plonk, but sauvignon blanc or viognier. Whole Earth living now means signing onto the waiting list for the latest hybrid and spending a wad on geothermal power.

Moreover, thanks to the current generation of influencers - the boomers' twentysomething offspring - there is a welcome complexity to all this trading-up of taste. In the same way that you can no longer dress straight out of the 1970s without somehow "mixing it up" with other random or contradictory stylistic associations, nothing will ever be as direct and uncomplicated as it was back in the boomers' heyday. For better or worse - and thanks in large part to the generation that brought us the notion of "cool" in the first place - we have all become connoisseurs.