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Two American blondes recently sold denim. Beyoncé, the Levi's ambassador, walks into a half-empty laundromat in illicit drag. She slips out of her 501s, revealing her white briefs to a pair of startled onlookers. The jeans go into a waiting machine, where they will be washed with diamonds instead of capsules of detergent. Under her cowboy crown, she smiles knowingly. Her track “Levi's Jeans” plays. But what she represents in the ad is not Levi's. As I mentioned, her project in the “Cowboy Carter” era was to present herself as a true patriot, a defender of the country's traditions against the deceptive claims of white supremacists. Reworking Levi's ad copy, the classic 1985 “Laundromat” ad in which its white love interest, Nick Kamen, was stripped down to his boxers, she resurrects the historic brand as a black queen. Americana can be hers, too.
Which brings us to the second blonde bombshell, actress Sydney Sweeney, who recently became the face of American Eagle. What does this campaign represent? Packaging is everywhere, a confusion of tone and intent. There’s the fantasy of a car commercial, with Sweeney in control, working on the engine of her Mustang, the camera following her as she wipes her hands on her butt. There’s a hint of the theatrics of the ad: Sweeney, wearing a cropped denim jacket and bell-bottoms, says directly to the camera, “I’m not here to tell you to buy American Eagle jeans, and I’m definitely not going to tell you that these are the most comfortable jeans I’ve ever worn,” as the camera zooms in on her crotch and butt. There’s also a girl-next-door scene that parodies Hollywood or porn, with Sweeney, this time in a cropped white button-down and loose denim pants, auditioning. A man off-camera asks Sweeney to show him her hands, and she complies. In all the videos, she’s a supplicant, including one you’ve probably seen before: Sweeney’s body is on its back like a landscape, the camera panning over it as she zips up her jeans, cooing, “Genes are passed from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, even eye color.” The camera zooms in on her big blue eyes. “My genes are blue.” And then the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” (In another video, a blonde woman, presumably Sweeney, cheekily changes a wheat-glued sign that reads “Sydney Sweeney has great genes” to “jeans.”)
Denim ads make people irritated. Does it all stem from the fundamental contrast between starch and flesh? Surely the minds behind the Sweeney campaign were seeking to evoke Brooke Shields, who declared to Richard Avedon’s camera in 1980, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” In another ad for the campaign, Shields, feigning difficulty in pulling on a pair of skinny jeans, says, “The secret of life is hidden in the genetic code.” The perverse element, the artistic device, in that Calvin Klein ad was Shields’s age: she was fifteen. Sweeney was twenty-seven. No great artist had shot that ad. The allusion is incoherent unless we dig for other meanings, and we don’t have to look far: genes that refer to Sweeney’s famously ample bosom; genes that refer to her whiteness. (American Eagle said the campaign “was and always has been about jeans.”) Notably, breasts and their attraction are stereotyped as objects of white desire, in contrast to, say, black men’s attraction to butts. Sweeney, on the cusp of full-blown stardom, has a legion of fans, the most ardent of whom want to see her as some kind of Aryan princess. For them, she signals, as my colleague Lauren Michelle Jackson wrote, “a sense of glee at the supposed return to a bygone beauty standard amid all the overzealous feminism they accuse the left of inflicting.”
Many people dislike the campaign, and for good reason: it lacks the irony and vulgarity that might enliven the dreary, cynical atmosphere. But the servility of conservatives—everyone from Megyn Kelly to J.D. Vance—is reactive, driven by a dislike that, yes, reached a peak of indignation but that I think dissipated fairly quickly, turning into boredom and fatigue. Still, everyone wants to choose their own view of sobriety and proportion. Stephen Colbert, now hosting The Late Show with a hunted self-assurance, criticized the outraged
Sourse: newyorker.com
