Nymphet Alumni

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, interviews the trio behind Nymphet Alumni, a fashion and culture podcast.

The internet loves nothing more than a new, buzzy portmanteau. How many times can we attach the suffix “-core” to a familiar word or phrase? (We can only hope that “corecore” signifies the end of all “cores.”) Enough already, I thought last May, when I wrote a screed condemning this widespread aesthetic psychosis. I wanted to opt out of the mind-numbing trend-mill. Naturally, it proved impossible. The best way to cope with the circumstances, I realized, was curating the information I consumed on trends.

The Nymphet Alumni podcast was a project born out of a loose internet friendship between Biz Sherbert (@markfisherquotes), Alexi Alario (@alexineutron), and Sam Cummins (@bloodgobbler), starting in February 2021. The first episode I listened to was about hot girl summer’s reactionary counterpart: the blob girl. I didn’t really care about blob girls or hot girls. But I was riveted by the Nymphets’ commentary on the cultural circumstances that gave rise to this aesthetic juxtaposition. It was like catnip for my interests.

The trio has proven to be masters in the art of digital aesthetic nomenclature. They have coined some of my favorite phrases: blokette (the English version of sporty chic), mass Bushwick (how underground Bushwick culture went mainstream), spiritual bimboism (why bimbos can be kind of woo-woo), and sugar cookie consumerism (the era of Victoria Secret PINK, Bath and Body Works, and 2010s girlish mall rat nostalgia). Their commentary isn't limited to the trends at hand. They dive deep into the cultural and historical forces that might’ve led to its gradual emergence.

There are obvious pitfalls to ascribing too much meaning to aesthetics, but I think of the Nymphets as contemporary participants in a decades-old tradition of fashion philosophy. It’s part of French literary tradition; the French were not as quick as Americans to dismiss fashion and aesthetics as frivolous. They understood it to be a reflection of the culture—not as serious as politics, but equally as pervasive. To quote the writer Roland Barthes: “Fashion exists only through the discourse on it.” And if that discourse is not letting up, why not contribute it… through a podcast?

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Terry Nguyen: Nymphet Alumni’s launch, to me, feels really concurrent with the demand for expository commentary and in-depth trend analysis. I interviewed Biz for a story on this topic last year, actually. Where do you feel like the podcast fits into the commentary landscape and yourself individually?

Alexi Alario: None of us are active podcast fans, so we didn’t have that many reference points. The podcast was an extension of our group chat, so we wanted to have a verbal record of the conversations we were having. Something casual but with an element of research, kind of NPR-style. We do a ton of research beforehand and have a lot of notes to guide the conversation, but we’re trying to be more flexible. I went to school for visual art and criticism, but I also had my own interests in internet culture and fashion. I was a K-pop stan. I was more drawn to the internet’s visual culture than whatever was happening in the art world.

Sam Cummins: I’m interested in literary theory and criticism, like New Historicism, which teaches you to situate the text in the culture that created it. That’s also been my approach with the podcast.

Biz Sherbert: I went to fashion school. I think a lot about fashion history and how to apply academic frameworks into fashion analysis. I mostly feel like a writer, although I make a lot of different forms of content. I think what makes the pod work is that we all share a similar sensibility in approaching the internet and material culture as a system for meaning.

TN: Are we doomed to be stuck in a trend cycle forever? Dirt has a piece on regression in pop culture, and I recently read something by Adina Glickstein in Spike on how the 2010s are back. What’s your take on this?

BS: We anticipated this a bit even in February 2021. We were anticipating this resurgent interest in mid-2010s Tumblr culture. It’s always been a huge point of fascination for us, this circularity. Our first episode was on American Apparel and its place in this alleged indie sleaze resurgence. Last year, we did an episode on the Snap-ocalypse and the second wave of filter aesthetics. We also consider how the mode of technology affects people’s presentations and style.

With the Snap episode, we talked about how girls were into wearing super contoured, harsh, heavy makeup. At that point, front-facing camera technology wasn’t super developed. Our selfies were grainy and softer compared to today’s. The Snap camera was also really bad. Now, with super HD cameras, that makeup style would look severe and scary. There’s a mechanism in the social apps we use that resurface old memories, what you were doing in 2016 or 2014, for example. So we each have our own personal libraries as to what exactly was trending. That wasn’t the case in the 2000s, so it feels much more ephemeral and not as tangible.

SC: These trend cycles are possibly an illusion. For people who are really online, it might seem like things are changing quickly, but it isn’t. I think we just experienced a shift in culture during the pandemic; it feels very much like that moment in the ‘80s with the emergence of MTV. Everything changed all at once, and upended what we were used to. I don’t know if the next thing is going to be an exact rehash of the 2010s. Right now, with the Y2K trend, people aren’t dressed like the 2000s. They’re dressing up according to an idealized version of it.

AA: We’re also less interested in the macro of Y2K to 2010s. It’s more specific. Everything became more atomized that decade because of social media, so it’s hard to define as a broad phenomenon. We’ve done different episodes on subcultures of the 2010s, like what we’ve called the “Xandemic” and twee culture. We’re zooming into these aesthetic niches, so it doesn’t feel as overwhelming. It’s interesting to see how personal style will develop—how fashion and aesthetics are defined by temporal or geographic signifiers.

TN: Do you ever struggle with the tension of not wanting to give certain topics that weight of analysis or prescribing too much meaning to something?

BS: We don’t ever encourage consumption super directly on the pod. The term “blokette” had so much resonance after Alexi invented it. But when people talk about it or write articles on it, it’s almost always related to buying clothes or styling that aesthetic. For us, the context is more interesting. If you understand where the clothes come from or why characters or people dress a certain way in, like, vampire movies from the 2000s, it makes you appreciate, for example, a baby-doll top a lot more. You can also criticize a trend but admit to liking it aesthetically!

SC: We found an article written in 1987 complaining about how there were too many op-eds about aesthetics. It was so fascinating because in the 80s, this was perpetuated by MTV and music videos but it’s very similar to what’s been happening on TikTok. When new forms of audio or visual media start entering the mainstream and dominating culture, traditional media tries to reorient the culture around this development. People begin to write op-eds or studies to control and make sense of these new things. Except with TikTok, now anyone can make a video.

AA: A good way of combating consumption, I think, is to approach your clothes with a healthy form of materialism: to have appreciation for material things and recognize the fact that they’re encoded in history or are a reaction to things happening at a point in time. We recognize that trends aren’t always new. We want to normalize having a healthy curiosity about trends without having to participate in them.

TN: How do you determine which topics to talk about?

SC: It really differs per topic. We recently launched a Patreon and Discord for paid listeners, which has been super generative. Our listeners are so smart; the conversations and observations there are so high level. Sometimes, a topic will come up two days before we record and we change plans. Other times, it’s an idea we’ve had for months. It comes down to the organic conversations we’re having with each other throughout the week. The Global South-core episode was something we talked about for awhile, probably since the podcast’s inception. It’s about how the algorithm would serve Westerners either Instagram Reels or TikToks from foreign countries. Sometimes, this content is clickbait. It’s super bizarre and edited in a jarring way to induce a “WTF” reaction from viewers. We were sending each other these videos for awhile, trying to figure out what it says about globalism in the digital age. With the World Cup coming in December, we thought it was a good catalyst for the topic.

AA: We’re very sensitive to the trend cycle. Even though we have topics we’ve been thematically interested in, we have like a good sixth sense for when something is really about to take off. When that sense of urgency kicks in, we have to get into it before everyone else does. One way is through the “emergency” round table. The first one was about Billie Eilish and the Vanity Fair cover. The second was Addison Rae’s campaign with Praying and Adidas. These are both viral fashion images that have produced a lot of toxic reactions and discourse online. We weren’t reacting solely to the image, but contextualizing why it would’ve garnered such a reaction.

BS: We've also done a couple that are quite topical, like the Olivia Rodrigo pill, which was in direct reaction to her viral popularity. There was Jennifer’s Body, which was about Megan Fox, Y2K, and Bimboism coming back into the culture. With the roundtables, it felt like an emergency, but we put it out four days after. For us, it was an emergency on island time.

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