Sydney Sweeney's ad tells us we're still attracted to conventional beauty

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American actress Sydney Sweeney's ad for the American Eagle brand , which plays on the ambiguity between the words "jeans" and "genes," " is a kind of middle finger to the (woke) movement that has tried to blow up all our old ideas about beauty. She's not the future of advertising. She's the past, reborn, and making more money than ever," writes journalist Kara Kennedy in The Free Press. In the ad, Sweeney, leaning against a vintage Ford Mustang, lists her hereditary traits: blonde hair, blue eyes. She says a word that sounds like "jeans," and then states that "they are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color." "She avoids mentioning the two most important traits everyone thinks of, but the camera doesn't avoid them," writes Kara Kennedy. Then she gets to the punchline: "My jeans are blue." The screen flashes, then the text appears: "Sydney Sweeney has amazing genes," with the word "genes" crossed out and brazenly replaced with the word "jeans." Kennedy wonders whether the pun is truly sensible and harmless, the kind of joke a father would make, because in recent days criticism has mounted, calling it "pure Nazi propaganda," "regressive," "racist," and "tone deaf." Even American newspapers and television channels like MSNBC have called Sweeney's campaign a sign of an "unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness," promoting the idea that white, blonde, and blue-eyed people have better genes.

Meanwhile, the American right “did what it often does when the left says something harmless is very racist,” the journalist writes: it made it the symbol of its cultural battle against political correctness and woke ideology. “Woke advertising is dead. Sydney Sweeney destroyed it,” reads a post on X that went viral. Republican Senator for the state of Texas Ted Cruz also wrote on X: “Wow. Now the crazy left has turned on beautiful women. I’m sure this will do great in the polls,” and White House Communications Director Steven Cheung also wrote: “Cancel culture has gone crazy. This distorted, idiotic, dense liberal thinking is a major reason Americans voted the way they did in 2024. They’re tired of this bullshit.” Finally, Donald Trump Jr. shared an AI-generated photo of the American president in double jeans, in the same pose as Sydney, on Instagram: “Um, Donald is so hot right now!!!”

Sydney Sweeney is sexy, yes, “but the 27-year-old is also so much more,” writes Kara Kennedy. “She is incredibly, incredibly powerful. This woman can move markets. American Eagle shares rose nearly 20 percent after her campaign failed. She didn't just sell jeans—the profits from which, incidentally, go to a domestic violence charity—she added hundreds of millions in value to a publicly traded company virtually overnight. Once upon a time, we would have accepted that and moved on. There was a time, in the not-so-distant past, when a beautiful woman selling jeans was simply great advertising. But lately, the American public has become accustomed to a very different kind of advertising, one that tries to convince us that beauty is whatever they decide it to be each week.” That is, “the ad campaigns featuring swimsuits revealing sagging breasts, the lingerie photoshoots showcasing ample curves, the press releases relentlessly declaring that representation is the new trend. For nearly a decade, brands have insisted on telling us what we should find sexy—stretch marks, back rolls, visible panic attacks—whether we like it or not.” The body positivity movement told us, loudly and incessantly, that everyone is beautiful, that all bodies deserve to be highlighted , that a triple chin is not only normal, but also a factor of empowerment, a breakthrough in self-awareness. That obesity was not a health crisis, but an identity.

But that era, according to Kennedy, wasn't about celebrating women: it was about neutralizing beauty, "tapping the edges of desirability until no one felt left out and no one stood out." " And here comes Sweeney, basking in her exceptional, extraordinary, stunning body. Sexual and looking like an unmodified Victoria's Secret Angel, leaning into a low-waisted denim convertible. Saying, 'Yeah, I'm lucky, I have really, really good genes.' And the contrast is almost comical." For the Spectator correspondent, Sweeney embodies a broader shift in sentiment that is, whether it's true or not, Trumpian: "TikTok is flooded with conventionally attractive women posing in bikinis with the American flag. 'Maga babe' is serious business, and you can buy her calendar. It's a cultural vindication after years of being told that curvy lingerie models were inspiring. Of believing the polite fiction that beauty was subjective ."

A fiction, indeed, according to Kara Kennedy, because in fact some women are more attractive than others. They always have been, and Sydney Sweeney is one of them: “She's sexy. She's blonde. Her body is a 10. She has the kind of face you'd choose to play a starlet in 1953. And the most offensive part of all? She knows it. She's not ashamed of it. She stands there, with her looks, and makes tons of money. And that, more than anything else, is what drives people crazy. Because it shows that people still want to look at beautiful people. They still want to buy what they wear. They're still attracted to sex. And Sydney Sweeney? She never stopped playing that game. She just played better than everyone else.”

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