Nymphet Alumni is a podcast made for the pop culture intelligentsia, reformed mall rats raised on Kant and Kylie Jenner lip kits. Armed with vocal fries and annotated editions of Capitalist Realism, Biz Sherbert, Alexi Alario, and Sam Cummins unpack the cultural conditions that give rise to strange aesthetic trends, granting the ephemeral and the frivolous intellectual heft. Alongside Rayne Fisher-Quann, Rhian Phin, and MJ Corey, these co-hosts belong to a vanguard of Hot Girl Critics who have accrued mass followings for applying complex theory to low-brow pursuits. “There’s a wave of discourse around feminine culture that we haven’t seen before,” Cummins says. “People are beginning to gain self-awareness over girl culture so we play up the academic approach in a cheeky way. Like, ‘Yeah, we’re doing the hard-hitting research’.” 

On the Nymphet Alumni Discord – which is available only to paying subscribers – listeners of the pod bond over the existential sadness of Ruby Lyn and how Phoebe Bridgers’ Spirit Halloween aesthetic gives “Hufflepuff”. There, the trio and their 700-odd disciples decode the runes of consumer culture, looking to Berger and Barthes just as much as they do ModernGurlz for mystic guidance. There’s a Dante and Virgil dynamic between the hosts and their listeners, but rather than traversing the speculative planes of the afterlife, they’re wading through Eurosummers, Spiritual Bimboism and the kaleidoscopic Superflat. The effect is just as enlightening and spiritual, like a deep-tissue massage for the OOTD-atrophied brain.  

Over on their recently minted Patreon, the podcast’s back catalogue reads like a game of pop-cultural nomenclature, their episode titles running the gamut of “Aprés Chic”, “The Snapocalypse”, “Russian Bimbocore”, “Blokette”, and “Broquette” (which is like an all-American version of the football jerseys and ribboned pigtail look that so often gets satirised on @socks_house_meeting). “I think our dream is to be modern-day aphorists and restore the tradition of aphorism,” Alario says. “It’s not us being like ‘This term is going to look so good on Nylon’s homepage!’ It’s just us having fun,” Sherbert adds. Unlike digital media’s continued obsession with the -core suffix, Nymphet Alumni works against advanced consumerism, where the style writing is as bountiful and poorly-constructed as fast fashion.

“I think that’s why we wanted to do audio,” Cummins explains. “To have distance from the feed and the surplus of everything else that’s going on there. We deal with a lot of subject matter related to consumerism and we do question how to go about it in an ethical manner. But I think the long-form audio format encourages people to take a moment and understand the culture and history that has led to the creation of different aesthetics.” It means the trio reframe trend as collective memory, mining a vast hinterland of references and unravelling lines of enquiry through real-life experience and online humour. Below, we catch up with the hosts on their internet friendships, Troye Sivan, and how to grow your brain.

I was just spending some time on your Reddit fan page. It’s adorable but it’s also giving psyop. Are you guys secretly behind it? 

Alexi Alario: I wish! It’s not really active anymore because we have a Discord. I think it was just for the floaters who were dying to have a community. It was a failure to launch a little bit. 

Sam Cummins: The Reddit just popped up randomly and we got really scared at first like ‘This is NOT good news’ but then everybody on there was literally so lovely and sweet. We got so lucky with our fanbase. They’re funny people.

Biz Sherbert: Well, someone said they were trying to make a Nymphet Alumni for Australians and were using Reddit as a recruiting device. More power to them! An Australian spin-off. 

And on Twitter, there are all these people uploading side-by-sides of choc chip yoghurts and healing necklaces alongside a screenshot of the pod, which I think is so Nymphet Alumni-coded. What are some of the lifestyle obligations that come with being a listener?

Sam Cummins: The majority of our audience is girls between the ages of 20 and 25 who are university educated. They’re very intelligent, funny, and stylish. But we also have a lot of construction workers in their 40s listening to us for some reason. It’s very diverse, very random.

Biz Sherbert: I actually met a listener backstage at a festival. He was just a guy with a guitar. He was ‘smouldering’. Like, goodness gracious. But I wanna list some symbolic qualities, like a character profile that would be on a deck or something. 

I think they like cute snacks, that’s something we learnt from our Discord. They love to laugh and get dressed but are not too concerned with being on trend. They’re concerned about the world but they’re not, like, annoying about it.

Sam Cummins: They all have cute jobs, too. Like baristas, kindergarten teachers, librarians, or people who work at Boba shops. But, like, young and sweet and fresh out of college. Whimsical people with a lot of joie de vivre.

I feel like we need to give a bit of context to how Nymphet Alumni came about. 

Biz Sherbert: So I was writing and making TikToks about fashion at the beginning of lockdown and I was also doing the @markfisherquotes Instagram account, which obviously has these long analytical captions on fashion and aesthetics. People just started enquiring if I would do a podcast and I struck up a really fruitful internet friendship with these two ladies. 

Alexi and I had a bunch of mutual friends because we’re kinda from the same place in South Carolina and we also dated the same person for a period of time. Meanwhile, Sam and I would send these crazy voice notes to each other that were like pre-Nymphet Alumni audio dispatches on culture. I just thought Alexi and Sam were so smart, intelligent, and charismatic and I was like, ‘Let’s go into business!’ It just came out of a time when internet friends were just more legitimate in a way. 

Sorry... my mum is silently bringing Starbucks into the room, which is very Simon Cowell-coded of me. 

Alexi Alario: I was confused about why I was brought in because the only thing I had on my resume was a smattering of writing about weird stuff like Minecraft. And then I did this K-pop documentary like a deranged fan. But what can I say? I guess had the X factor.

Biz Sherbert: At the time there wasn’t much writing on how internet culture has shaped fashion and aesthetics, so we felt inspired to talk about that.

Sam Cummins: We have this girl group connection, an industry plant vibe. It was all orchestrated in the background. We had never met in person until last year, and that’s the only time we’ve been under the same roof. 

And since the pandemic, there’s been an emergence of the ‘hot girl critic’ as a cultural protagonist online. Do you see yourselves as part of that movement?

Alexi Ario: We’re starting to think it might be beneficial to put our faces out there, we do happen to be pretty cute. I think part of what started that wave is that there’s such a surplus of visual media and hot girls making rounds on the internet, so embodying the hot girl energy is strange from an audio format. I think there’s a new wave of discourse around feminine culture in a manner we haven’t seen before, via the acceleration of online consumerism. Women being the easiest audience to sell products to has led to a lot of people gaining self-awareness over girl culture. I think that’s why we wanted to do audio, to have that distance from the feed and the surplus of everything going on there. 

It’s cool how you’ve managed to weather the ‘no more -cores!’ discourse. Do you think it’s safe to start naming and labelling trends again?

Alexi Alario: When we first started it was more about reflecting on certain cultural touchstones that we came across, like American Apparel or Rookie mag. Then we became a bit more predictive and tried to put names to things that we were seeing, but that’s something we’ve had qualms about. Like, we noticed last week that there’s a section of the adidas website on how to get the Blokette look. Because the audio format is so long and we put so much effort and research into contextualising something and unpacking it, we don’t get so much hate. We play up the academic approach in a cheeky way like ‘Yeah, we’re doing the hard-hitting research.’

Sam Cummins: We deal with a lot of subject matter related to consumerism and we do question how to go about it in an ethical manner. I think the long-form audio format encourages people to take a moment to understand the culture and history that has led to the creation of different aesthetics. People can take a pause and reflect rather than mindlessly adopting and discarding. 

Biz Sherbert: Also, there was a brand that was created recently that was called Blokette that sells Blokette-inspired apparel. But we just really enjoy wordplay and poetry and so when we coin a term we’re seeing it in a different way to marketing. We like when things rhyme and we like portmanteaus. It’s not us being like ‘This term is going to look so good on Nylon’s homepage!’ It’s just us having fun. 

Sam Cummins: I think our dream is to be modern-day aphorists and restore the tradition of aphorism. 

What do you think digital media gets wrong about trend reporting?

Biz Sherbert: The deadlines and the pressure to sometimes have a clickbait angle. Writers just don’t have enough time to research and write about things fully these days. We have three people focusing on different areas of a topic and audio is far less taxing than writing for some reason. We’re also all really interested in cultural memory versus the explicit details of a trend, and so we get a lot of excitement in pinning down our own memories from a certain time and how they resonate outwardly.

Sam Cummins: We do a lot of trends but we also focus on aesthetics more generally. Like, our Tiki episode was a good respite against trend culture because it was the most random aesthetic that we all just became obsessed with. We’re lucky because we create our own schedules and when we get fatigued with trends, we’ll do an episode on something that has nothing to do with modern culture. 

Why do you think the Blokette episode had such an impact? 

Alexi Ario: It’s just a funny name but it also physically manifested more so than anything else we’ve ever coined. I still see girls dressed like that all the time. It’s DIY and easy to replicate through thrifting vintage adidas and adding ribbons to something. It doesn’t require getting on SSENSE and buying some niche designer thing. It has an easy barrier to entry. 

Have you watched the new Troye Sivan video? It’s very Broquette. 

Biz Sherbert: Those big blue eyes. 

Alexi Alario: He’s like a forever teenager. 

Sam Cummins: I guess it’s what we’re predicting for this year. In a post-Blokette world, we’re coming back with Broquette. It’s essentially Blokette but American and a little more masculine, referencing baseball, football, and basketball in a cute and quirky way. We’re big on the masculinity agenda. We’re obsessed with bro culture, which has been the peak of anti-fashion for the past few years. So we’re trying to understand how we can make it fashionable again. 

Alexi Alario: We’re gonna go around the world and girlify global athletics. 

I feel like the culture is very baby girl at the moment. Like girl dinners, people calling Kendall Roy girly for crying. 

Sam Cummins: Culture is for young girls. They are the ultimate consumer. The real baby girls are now football players. 

What do you think is one of the most overlooked reasons as to why people wear what they wear?

Biz Sherbert: One thing that feels relevant is the idea behind those TikToks which are like ‘When you see the hot alternative boy but you’re wearing your Lululemon set and he doesn’t know you’re a hot alternative girl’. When I was younger, it felt so important to signal to other people that I was a certain type of lady, a certain type of girl and I think that ties into status. People are still trying to send out cues. 

Alexi Alario: People talk about fashion online via the language of costume and character design. People are so hyperaware of what each element of their outfit is communicating to the world. I also think what’s missing from fashion writing is the voice of the author, a lot of the content is so anonymous, I just don’t get a sense of what the author is into. 

Biz Sherbert: That makes it so much more interesting than just like ‘There was Cottagecore, then there was Dark Academia, and now there’s this! Can you believe it?’. That’s just not fun to read. 

What are some of the emergent trends that are marinating in your heads?

Alexi Alario: Bond girl vibes. Anyone can do it. It’s such an anonymous job and I love the idea of these women that just show up for one movie and are quite one-note but have a sexy costume and then die. 

Sam Cummins: I think one thing we’re going to start seeing more of is increased regionalism. Within the past few years on the internet, it feels like culture has flattened to the point where there are no distinctions between different parts of the world. What I’ve noticed a lot, especially with newer trends, is that they hold an appreciation for the diversity of global culture and I see a lot of people trying to define their physical locations. That’s very abstract but I think it’s going to make sense in the next year or two. 

Biz Sherbert: I’ve been really into bohemian stuff recently and this is so not smart, but I was on vacation recently and I saw so many people wearing Havaianas. My friend won’t stop wearing them in urban centres around the world. There’s something happening with people caring less. A couple of years ago people would have thought you were a disgusting freak to wear flip-flops in the city but I love the idea of fashion girls flip-flopping around. 

If someone wanted to become a good cultural critic, what are some of the seminal texts and media that people should consume?

Sam Cummins: We read a lot but the main recommendation I have is just to go to a library and pick out anything from the cultural criticism or philosophy section that stands out to you. I became interested in cultural criticism via Marshall McLuhan. I think most TikTok users would understand his work better than any professor that teaches media. I like Stephan Greenblatt’s New Historicism, too. It’s very much relevant to how Nymphet Alumni approach culture, like reading history and culture as a form of literature. Biz’s work really reminds me of Valerie Steele, too. 

Alexi Alario: I would say Walter Benjamin. He has a very mood-board vibe to me. I think he’s a good entry point if you’re someone who's drawn to images. He’s really into the early modern vibe and flâneurs and he also had really niche interests in things like toys and shopping and fashion. 

Biz Sherbert: I think anything that crosses your interest is probably going to be good for you in general. I find it really inspiring to see how people have described certain situations from a non-cultural theory perspective. Also, speaking to this idea of a hot girl cultural critic, you don’t need to sprinkle your Substack with Deleuze. It’s way more important to think for yourself than taking some social theory framework and plopping it on top of an aesthetic object. Just be inspired by the poetry of life!