Sydney Sweeney, a young hot blonde Hollywood starlet, is in an advertisement for clothing brand American Eagle. She writhes around the floor trying to do up a pair of denim jeans, with an almost inhumanly good body and doe eyes. “Genes”, she says, “are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.” The tagline of the entire campaign: Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.
I think it’s clever, it might even be funny. Enter the advertising hall of fame, with the Budweiser Clydesdales, Coca-Cola Christmas Truck, Guinness Toucans, and now Sydney Sweeney’s jeans. It is also what Hollywood is for: beautiful people, selling us things. The amateur bores among us have tried to argue about celebrities and body positivity and responsible, inclusive marketing for years, even decades now. They argued that corporations possessed some abstract ethical duty to turn their desire to make a profit into a progressive political argument. This particular constituency was never going to win the case. It’s just too worthy, finger-waggy and po-faced.
The movement – call it woke, call it social justice, whatever – spiralled into total decline by 2023. Their moralising decadence was revealed as not part of the grand arc of history, but instead a sociological blip. We know all of this to be true by now. So, I was full of admiration for the last remaining hangers-on as they came out in full force to condemn Sweeney and American Eagle, their howls of rage wrapped up in some illiterate rhetoric about late-stage capitalism. I think it is brave to come out swinging knowing that you lost the argument a long time ago. My version of the instinct is my continued, visceral defence of James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar.
What were they so mad about? First, the obvious: don’t sexualise women. Second, the insane: the play on words between jeans and genes is not innocent fun but instead promoting a white supremacist project of eugenics. Sweeney is blonde with blue eyes… and we are celebrating her DNA? “We all know where this one goes,” they say, with straight faces and encumbered intellects. My one regret about the entire charade is that American Eagle deleted the videos from their feeds. They didn’t need to capitulate – the cohort raging against them is small, culturally disenfranchised, and too humourless to worry about.
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And then, plot twist: Sweeney was revealed to be a registered Republican. Donald Trump was thrilled and delivered a cheering speech. “You’d be surprised at how many people are Republicans… If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic.” Later, he turned his pen to the subject, and wrote on Truth Social: “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there… Go get ‘em Sydney.” I’m not on these guys sides’ either, but at least they have a sense of fun.
Of course everyone is quick to declare victory: “Woke is dead in advertising” one Telegraph columnist declared, Telegraph-ically, on a podcast. “The vibe shift, she lives” goes the chorus. This is the final nail in the coffin for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and all those painting-defacing lunatics. Finally, the inevitable cultural victory for the right is here, as it was always meant to be. So runs the argument, anyway. (I wonder if these people have also failed to observe the ambient politics of the year: DEI policies still exist pretty much everywhere; universities are still under the cosh of activist students; we are still entertaining discussions about whether Ireland needs a dedicated woman’s museum.)
So, I think they are wrong too. The most frustrating thing for the disenfranchised social-progressives of the 2010s is not that they lost the culture war to a huge Conservative Machine, typified now by Sweeney’s genetic hegemony, but instead that they lost to something far more benign entirely: the centre. Because none of this episode is actually mainstream vindication for the worst political impulses of a Trump administration – trying to make that case is ludicrous. It’s just a light social correction to the moral excesses of the past decade; a hand held out in the dark to say “it’s okay, you’re allowed to have fun”; it is a victory for aesthetic liberation more than it has anything to do with politics.
[ Sydney Sweeney is selling her bathwater. What has become of us?Opens in new window ]
We should always return to the original text; look at the advert itself. Is the genes thing a bit right wing? Sure, whatever. But really this is Norman Rockwell’s sentimental realism; Taylor Swift’s “screeching tires of true love”; Bruce Springsteen’s stadia; hamburgers and milkshakes; corn silos in a flyover state; shanty towns in Appalachia; multi-lane highways; and clacking boardwalks of Coney Island. It’s just Americana, in all of its cliches and superlatives. The company is literally called American Eagle, what did you expect it to do?
In the great pendulum swing of politics, Sweeney in 2025 marks something: not a stake in the ground for Conservative values; but just a general and gentle loosening of cultural shibboleths. That really is a victory.
