Were it not for jeans advertisements, Sydney Sweeney’s bust and Sadie Sink’s arse, how else might we take the political temperature of the age? Last summer, Sweeney, America’s apex wind-up merchant, found herself at the centre of the “American Eagle jeans controversy” – a campaign which critics on the left claimed had “flirted with eugenics”.
On the right, however, this was seen as a reaction to the era of “denim wokery”, in which brands such as Calvin Klein and Levi’s had BLM-ed their jean output. Adverts were populated with the full contemporary pageant of inclusivity – trans, overweight, paraplegic, hijabi – while the traditional shivery, hungry white model was quietly shown the door. Hardworking and decent men were no longer permitted to ogle the likes of Kate Moss and Cindy Crawford. This was Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Big Brother was wearing your 501s.
And so it was with considerable relief, not to mention a certain libidinous excitement, that the online right welcomed Sadie Sink’s latest Calvin Klein advert. The 24-year-old actress, who first rose to fame at 14 in Stranger Things, dances around in her underwear before pulling on a pair of indigo Calvins. At one point, she bends over the bed and shakes her bum towards the camera, obligingly demonstrating the fit of the denim.
Sink is beautiful, youthfully so. But it is remarkable to watch the lonely-hearts club on X gargling over her fair skin, slim build and auburn hair as though they were sailors approaching the Lisbon quayside from Vasco da Gama’s Indian voyage. Their responses are explained away in terms of the “reproductive potential” of the young womb: to dribble down one’s own shirt at a jeans advert is, apparently, to be a primal man.
Dedicating one’s time to preventing men on the internet from oversexualising women is a thankless task. You might have a better time finding a rock and a hill to push it up. But to act as though Sadie Sink prancing around her room in an extra-small pair of jeans is somehow a diagnosis of the age – evidence of the pendulum clanging back towards the pre-woke era – is to know very little, at a fairly basic level, about fashion advertising.
Conventionally attractive people sell clothes. They always have. Maya Jama and Hailey Bieber were the faces of Levi’s at the zenith of wokeness in 2021. Jacob Elordi, Kaia Gerber and Megan Thee Stallion fronted Calvin Klein that same year. If the persecuted, beleaguered men of the internet were indeed subjected to the occasional plus-sized model in denim, they were, undoubtedly, being shown another 15 pictures of chiselled, seductive models at the same time.
Anonymous X trolls may convince themselves that, as Sink forces her arse into the jeans, she is signing up to eugenics, IQ and all the rest. But let us not crown her the face of the Aryan revolution. Sink is unlikely to have regarded this short-form digital campaign as a stand against the mob. She is far more likely to have seen it, as any rational person might, as an opportunity to sell some jeans.
That it is now considered both brave and unconventional to lust after women who are young and conventionally attractive shows just how twisted the political perspective has become. “Slim, beautiful women are back in fashion. Thank God for that,” declared the Telegraph. “Lust can’t be lectured,” opined the Spectator.
But why, exactly, do we all feel so attacked? As a left-leaning young woman who leaned even further during my university years, in the high age of woke, I can admit that some of the politics of the era indulged in the ridiculous. But to suggest that it cracked down on the basic laws of attraction is revisionist history. You could publicly fancy young, slim, white redheads then. And, if the internet is anything to go by, you certainly still can now.
[Further reading: Vinted Brain]
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Although the new Sydney Sweeney ad for Novig is simply soft porn. Who on earth thought it was at all acceptable in any day and age???