FORCE OF NATURE

Call Her Daddy's Alex Cooper has charted a course from raunchy sex talk to cheerful feminist empowerment. Millions have come along for the ride. Alessandra Codinha on the rise of a new-media superstar.

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FATHER FIGURE "I'm a marketer through and through," says Cooper, who has built an empire around the Call Her Daddy podcast she started in 2018 with her then roommate Sofia Franklyn. Cooper wears Chloé. Fashion Editor: Rebecca Ramsey.

I hear them before I see them. A hundred-plus 20-something women clamoring along a Tribeca Film Festival red carpet tucked by New York’s West Side Highway. They wear outfits recommended to them on Tik-Tok: jeans and floaty tops, silk boxer shorts under blazers, little black dresses and big sunglasses. Their hair is styled, their makeup done to look undone. They are the #Daddy Gang, and they are here for the premiere of the Hulu documentary Call Her Alex and to be in the presence of the highest-paid woman in podcasting: Alexandra Cooper, the 30-year-old Call Her Daddy star turned media macher who calls herself their Founding Father.

Cooper, petite and blond, arrives in a tight, corseted Roberto Cavalli satin dress and stiletto sandals to a trumpeting scream from the crowd. She cups a hand around her glossed mouth and calls out: “Daddy Gang!” The resulting roar erupts with a surge of lifted phones. Everyone is eager to capture Cooper's glowing skin and her blowout, which, one onlooker later informs me, is “definitely” a few shades darker than usual. There’s an element of morale boost in the crowd. “She's like...this ethereal being,” I hear, and the point is that they know she was not always so. Money, power, respect, and the accordant professional aestheticians and stylists have all been recent developments. There’s hope, is what they're saying.

"I want to look back and be like, I went as hard as I could, and then some"