Sydney Sweeney’s campaign for denim brand American Eagle is not very good. In one deleted video the actress, 27, is writhing on the ground and trying to pull on her jeans, in imitation of a controversial Calvin Klein ad from 1980 starring a 15-year-old Brooke Shields. (“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour,” she says sultrily). In another she’s striding through a mirrored room, doing reverse psychology. (“This is not me telling you to buy American Eagle jeans”). At the end of each ad we find a slogan overlaid in big white letters. “SYDNEY SWEENEY HAS GREAT JEANS.”
We are supposed to pick up on the homophony – if you wrote a book called Easy Puns for Beginner Copywriters this one would probably be on the first page. But Sweeney has blue eyes and dyed blonde hair, and the racial implications have got American Eagle into a lot of trouble. There have been struggle sessions, the sort that wouldn’t seem out of place in the summer of 2020: a commentator on LBC pointed out that Sweeney’s initials are SS, like the Nazi guard; an Instagram influencer begged us to think about “the 13-year-old brown girl who gets all her denim at American Eagle.”
Pundits on the other side have a reason to be excited. Sweeney, it emerges, has been a registered Republican in the state of Florida for over a year. “The HOTTEST ad out there,” Donald Trump trumpeted in response to this news, comparing Sweeney to Democrat Taylor Swift (“NO LONGER HOT”). “The tide has seriously turned – being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be!”
We have spent the best part of a year being lectured about tide changes and “vibe shifts.” Now one has actually happened, and it doesn’t seem to mean anything. Sweeney’s Republican status is not at odds with her public persona; it will not inspire any reckonings or meltdowns. It is just an awkward statement tacked onto the end of a confusing career. Her filmography only evidences contemporary Hollywood’s disinterest in cultivating any mythos at all. She has been a devout nun (Immaculate), a rural drug addict (Echo Valley) and a conventional romcom lead (Anyone But You). Her mainstream breakout was in edgy teen soap Euphoria, where she played a popular student led into madness by her struggles with sex and romance. Now she is about to star in a biopic of welterweight boxer Christy Martin.
This jumpiness hurts her and it hurts her party. Our current failure to typecast is also a failure to create a larger political logic. In the earlier days of Hollywood you had card-carrying Republican James Stewart, who spent 60 years cast almost constantly as an upstanding American citizen. First he played Mr Smith, the idealistic Scout leader who took it upon himself to Go To Washington and interfere in federal politics; later he played conscientious cowboys, lawyers and policemen. Screenwriters conspired with studio heads to create the image; gossip columnists merged it with real life. Republicanism had its onscreen avatar. Directors could promote it or subvert it at will.
America’s film studios and PR agencies are too scattered to orchestrate something like this again. There can be no organised strategy when everything runs on a freelance contract. And it is impossible to create a coherent “hero’s journey” for someone who can jump ship to a different project whenever they want. The only thing Sweeney can signify in 2025 is that the Republican Party has young people in it, and that some of them are attractive blondes. This messaging bears no difference to the right-wing strategy of the mid-2010s, when Lauren Southern and Tomi Lahren presided over the libertarian courts of North America.
Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign is only a week old, but you would be forgiven for thinking it came from the discourse cycle five or ten years ago. In twentieth-century Hollywood, aspect ratios, colours and compositions generally changed with the political mood; the shift from film noir to Western tracked with a move from widespread anxiety to post-war optimism.
But when vibe-shiftress Sweeney tricks you into buying jeans she is cloaked in the same green-tinged mire as every other major cultural figure for the past 15 years. It is the preferred lighting scheme of both Lars von Trier and Jon M Chu; it has dimmed many politically-acceptable television ads and veiled countless Democrat celebrities on the covers of Anna Wintour’s gloomy Vogue. This subdued aesthetic is the Long 2010s. It stands for the murky reality of a disintegrated Hollywood, in which nobody particularly represents anything. And its continued use tells us something: none of us are ever getting away from this.
[See also: The Sabrina Carpenter effect]
Content from our partners
Related
