On March 26, 2021, Chet Hanks, the son of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, turned his phone camera on himself to make a surprisingly influential declaration: It was the beginning of “white boy summer.” Not a Donald Trump- or NASCAR-adjacent brand of whiteness, he clarified. His reference points were singers like Jon B. and Jack Harlow: He pictured hot months filled with tank tops, tattoos and attempts to get invited to the proverbial cookout.
This did not materialize, but Hanks’s phrase stuck; it is still used constantly. When Tom Hardy appeared at this year’s Met Gala in what looked like a durag, one popular tweet called it a harbinger of “six more weeks of white boy summer.” Hanks has to issue periodic statements defending the idea from use by supremacist groups. More than anything, the meme solidified a lasting cultural practice: Every summer, the internet must come to a consensus on what that summer is all about.
Hanks was not the first to brand the season. For one thing, all modern efforts sit in the vast shadow of 1967’s Summer of Love. For another, “white boy summer” was preceded by 2019’s “Hot Girl Summer,” which was both a Megan Thee Stallion song and a catchphrase people used to justify everything from sleeping around to eating tinned fish. The years since have featured a summer themed around a “Minions” movie (2022); the summer of “Barbenheimer” (2023); and the blockbuster “brat summer” of 2024, in which a Charli XCX album and its distinctive, apple-green cover so dominated internet discourse that the “brat” theme was briefly taken up by Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. (As the young Democratic activist David Hogg told followers online, “Nancy Pelosi has been informed of the meaning of Brat.”)
What about this year? In April, Charli XCX took the stage at the Coachella festival and proposed some fresh options, which flashed on screens behind her. Almost all involved film auteurs with 2025 releases: Ari Aster summer, David Cronenberg summer, the summers of Celine Song or Joachim Trier or Darren Aronofsky. These propositions did get some traction; Elle Fanning was later spotted in a “Joachim Trier Summer” T-shirt. But unsettling work like Cronenberg’s doesn’t exactly have mass-market viral potential. As someone quipped on X: “[Gets arrested for opening an unlicensed gynecology practice] This was supposed to be the summer of Cronenberg :(”
Since spring, I have encountered nominations for Vampire Weekend summer, slop summer, rat summer, creek girl summer and #bootsonlysummer, a fashion trend involving soccer cleats. A friend who left X for Bluesky noticed a lack of summer discourse on the newer platform and made a halfhearted attempt to start “Bob Seger summer”; I was one of only nine likers. By June, the branding of summer 2025 still seemed as muddled as this April post on X: “I have got to have a white lotus lorde Addison hot yoga all adventurous women do Kendall Roy sunrise on the reaping Joan Baez summer.”
Brands are always, always riding shotgun for summer phenomena, or at least trying to ride in their wake.
There are glimmers of potential, but they remain limited to small pockets of influence. One comes from Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, whose campaign was particularly energizing among younger voters. Its striking visual design — Bollywood-inspired typeface, bright splashes of marigold yellow — has become material for the internet’s riffing, repurposed by groups including fans of the Mets and Silicon Valley types arguing in defense of billionaires.
In July, Justin Bieber released an album with a four-letter title (“Swag”) and gray-on-black art that felt like a dark-mode version of “Brat.” A video clip of Bieber achieved meme status before the release, but the “swag summer” he might have wished for did not develop. Late in the month, the internet had yet to reach any consensus.
Summer vacation is often attributed to the agrarian calendar, but it was just as driven by urban needs: Before air-conditioning, summer in the city was sweltering, and those who could afford to leave for the country did. By the late 1800s, the modern summer break had emerged. With it, supposedly, would come all sorts of opportunities for memory-making, self-improvement and reinvention — possibilities that raise hopes in spring (as when George Costanza, on “Seinfeld,” resolves to have a “summer of George”), get nostalgized in song (as in Bryan Adams’s “Summer of ’69”) and echo in every wish for a white-boy or hot-girl summer.
The mood of the season was quickly defined — and sold. From ads on the sides of buildings to magazine covers, images of summer would be everywhere. In the 1920s and ’30s, Good Humor built and expanded a fleet of trucks and tricycles, helping to make ice cream a core summer ritual. In the summer of 1959, Dick Clark helped spark another with the Caravan of Stars tour, a mass music event aimed at youth. Later it would be movies that dominated conversation: Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” released in 1975, is considered the first true summer blockbuster. (Decades later, a string of real-life attacks would have media calling 2001 the “summer of the shark.”) On June 11, 1982, Spielberg would release “E.T.,” the highest-grossing film of all time, at least until Spielberg released “Jurassic Park” on the same day in 1993.
Even with the decline of theatergoing, the impact of the summer blockbuster has not entirely waned. In 2023, the dueling same-day releases of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” bled heavily into online discourse, helping to make “Barbie” the highest-grossing film of the year and “Oppenheimer” the third-highest. The “Barbie” marketing army booked 100 brand collaborations and stoked social media tags like #Barbiecore, which, on TikTok, still surfaces a vast field of all-pink everything. In countless internet memes — for instance, a much-circulated photo of a pink-and-purple house standing next to a black one in Santa Monica — the two films’ signature colors became stand-ins for the movies themselves, just as that garish green would become synonymous with “Brat” a summer later. When Hollywood baits the internet correctly, it can still create a phenomenon.
For pop musicians, who no longer blanket the nation via radio, that kind of ubiquity would be a dream. An album rollout like the one for “Brat” wants to achieve virality and sustain it as long as possible, tapping multiple revenue streams along the way: performances, merchandise, brand partnerships. (Brands are always, always riding shotgun for summer phenomena, or at least trying to ride in their wake.) This spring, anticipating a new album from the singer Lorde, Vogue declared that “Lorde Summer Is Almost Upon Us”; Charli XCX suggested a “Lorde Summer,” too, from the Coachella stage. But Lorde is more introverted than her peers; she has not seized a role as the season’s mascot.
It seems inevitable that before the season is out, one “summer of X” or “Y summer” will catch fire. There is even some chance that it will happen organically, bubbling up through the internet itself. But these days the odds are high that it will be a brute-force marketing exercise, a coup for one of the films and pop stars vying to dominate online discussion. It will bring the internet together, briefly, until cynicism and fatigue set in. (Typically, around the time it attracts the attention of brand accounts and politicians.) The more fragmented our culture gets, the more we seem to crave some phenomenon, however silly, to share. Which one we choose won’t matter nearly so much as the impulse to adopt it in the first place — the draw of the wet hot American monoculture itself.
Daisy Alioto is a founder of Dirt Media. Her work has appeared in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Paris Review Daily and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Source photographs for illustration above: David Morgan/Getty Images; Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images; Lisa Thornberg/Getty Images; Kevin Winter/ Getty Images for The Recording Academy, via; Bertrand Guay/AFP, via Getty Images; New York Times/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Charles Deluvio/Unsplash; David Clode/Unsplash.
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