Two American blondes have recently hawked denim. Beyoncé, an ambassador for Levi’s, dressed in outlaw drag, arrives at a semi-deserted laundromat. She slinks out of her 501s, revealing her white briefs to a couple of stunned onlookers. The jeans go in a waiting washing machine, to be tossed with diamonds instead of detergent pods. Under her cowboy hat-cum-crown, she is smiling knowingly. Her song “Levii’s Jeans” is playing. But what she’s selling in the commercial is not Levi’s. As I’ve written before, her project, in this “Cowboy Carter” era, has been to cast herself as the real patriot, a protector of this country’s traditions from the fraudulent claims of white supremacists. By “reimagining,” to paraphrase the ad copy of the Levi’s campaign, the classic advertisement “Launderette,” from 1985—which had its white male love object, Nick Kamen, strip down to his boxers—she is burnishing a heritage brand in her Black-queen image. Americana can be hers, too.
That brings us to the second blonde, the actress Sydney Sweeney, who recently became the face of American Eagle. What is this campaign selling? The package is all over the place, a mishmash of tone and intent. There is the car-commercial fantasy, of Sweeney, in control, tending to her Mustang’s engine, the camera trailing her as she wipes her hands on her backside. There is the wink at advertisement theatre: Sweeney, wearing a cropped denim jacket and flares, speaking directly to the camera, “I’m not here to tell you to buy American Eagle jeans, and I definitely won’t say that they’re the most comfortable jeans I’ve ever worn,” as said camera zooms in on her crotch and her ass. There is the girl-next-door scene, parodying Hollywood or porn, of Sweeney, this time in a cropped white button-down and wide-leg denim trousers, being filmed for an audition tape. A man, off camera, asks Sweeney to show him her hands, and she obeys. All the clips depict her as supplicant, including the one that you’ve likely already seen: Sweeney’s whole body lying supine as a kind of landscape, the camera panning over it, as she zips up her jeans, cooing, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” The camera arrives at its destination, her big blue eyes. “My genes are blue.” And then the tag line: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” (Another video shows a blond woman, presumably Sweeney, cheekily correcting a wheat-pasted poster that had read “Sydney Sweeney has great genes” to “jeans.”)
Denim ads get people riled up. Does it all flow from the foundational contrast between starch and flesh? No doubt the minds behind the Sweeney campaign wanted to stir memories of Brooke Shields, declaring to Richard Avedon’s camera, in 1980: “You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” In another ad for the campaign, Shields, mock-struggling to put on a pair of skin-tight jeans, says, “The secret of life lies hidden in the genetic code.” The element of perversion, the artistic touch, in that Calvin Klein ad was Shields’s age, which was fifteen. Sweeney is twenty-seven. No great artist directed these commercials. The allusion is incoherent, unless, of course, we root around for other meanings, and we don’t have to search for long: genes, referring to Sweeney’s famously large breasts; genes, referring to her whiteness. (American Eagle has said that the campaign “is and always was about the jeans.”) Interestingly, breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass. Sweeney, on the precipice of totalizing fame, has an adoring legion, the most extreme of whom want to recruit her as a kind of Aryan princess. To them, she signals, as my colleague Lauren Michele Jackson wrote, a “rejoicing in a perceived return to a bygone beauty standard in the wake of all that overzealous feminism they blame on the left.”
A lot of people don’t like the ad campaign, and there are plenty of reasons not to: there’s no irony or camp to leaven the trashy, dog-whistle atmosphere. But the fawning from conservatives—everyone from Megyn Kelly to J. D. Vance—is reactive, precipitated by the dislike, which, yes, reached a pitch of outrage, but dissipated, fairly quickly I think, into a bored fatigue. Still, everyone wants to elect their perspective of sobriety and proportion. Stephen Colbert, who now hosts “The Late Show” with a persecuted swagger, chastised the outraged, those who see the ad as master-race propaganda, claiming that they were overreacting. Can’t you handle a stupid pun, in other words? To be clear, many of us—the Negroes, the queers, the hairy feminists, et cetera, et cetera—do not react out of a feeling of personal injury, as if the blondeness-as-beauty standard has terrorized us. Whom does that standard terrorize more than white cis women, honestly? We have our own blondes, selling us fantasies.
Sweeney said in an interview a year and a half ago that she is, in fact, a brunette—not a blonde. Actually, what she said is, “The biggest misconception about me is that I am a dumb blonde with big tits. I’m naturally brunette.” Big laughter. Sweeney is alert to the public’s attachment to her. Her blondness, like a lot of adult blondness, is a chemical thing masquerading as natural only to those most gullible in the population, straight men, who don’t know, and don’t care to understand, how much of so-called natural female beauty is constructed. The blonde is a construction that sells. Sweeney has been more than open about her aims at acquisitiveness. She is as likely to speak about herself as an artist as a businessperson, or even a business. She spoke plainly, in an interview from three years ago, about how acting can’t pay her bills. She takes advertising deals that seem beneath her. She has sold limited-edition soaps made from her bathwater. She’s reportedly working on a lingerie line that may get some funding from Jeff Bezos. The American Eagle campaign, its presentation of Americana as a zombie slop of mustangs, denim, and good genes, is lowest-common-denominator stuff. Decoding Sweeney’s presumed political affiliation—is she liberal or conservative?—doesn’t give this ad more meaning. It is what it is. ♦
