On Tuesday, Sept. 12, during the final stretch of New York Fashion Week, I meet Biz Sherbert, Sam Cummins, and Alexi Alario at the Metalabel offices in Lower Manhattan. Their podcast, Nymphet Alumni, debuted in March 2021 with a two-episode deep dive into the rise and fall of the American Apparel empire. Much ink has been spilled about the marriage of high and low culture, but the girls are in a league of their own, naming and analyzing digital trends as they emerge using the lens of critical theory — thinkers like Mark Fisher, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault are suddenly in conversation with aesthetics like “Russian Bimbocore” and “The Xandemic.” Debuting in a crowded landscape during the post-pandemic podcast boom of the early 2020s — years after Red Scare had created a cultural appetite for young, intellectual women saying the word “daddy” — the three friends set themselves apart with their sincerity, style, and new way of seeing consumerism and mass-culture.
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