The New Yorker:

The American Eagle campaign, with its presentation of Americana as a zombie slop of mustangs, denim, and good genes, is lowest-common-denominator stuff.

By Doreen St. Félix

Two American blondes have recently hawked denim. Beyoncé, an ambassador for Levi’s, dressed in outlaw drag, arrives at a semi-deserted laundromat. She slinks out of her 501s, revealing her white briefs to a couple of stunned onlookers. The jeans go in a waiting washing machine, to be tossed with diamonds instead of detergent pods. Under her cowboy hat-cum-crown, she is smiling knowingly. Her song “Levii’s Jeans” is playing. But what she’s selling in the commercial is not Levi’s. As I’ve written before, her project, in this “Cowboy Carter” era, has been to cast herself as the real patriot, a protector of this country’s traditions from the fraudulent claims of white supremacists. By “reimagining,” to paraphrase the ad copy of the Levi’s campaign, the classic advertisement “Launderette,” from 1985—which had its white male love object, Nick Kamen, strip down to his boxers—she is burnishing a heritage brand in her Black-queen image. Americana can be hers, too.

That brings us to the second blonde, the actress Sydney Sweeney, who recently became the face of American Eagle. What is thiscampaign selling? The package is all over the place, a mishmash of tone and intent. There is the car-commercial fantasy, of Sweeney, in control, tending to her Mustang’s engine, the camera trailing her as she wipes her hands on her backside. There is the wink at advertisement theatre: Sweeney, wearing a cropped denim jacket and flares, speaking directly to the camera, “I’m not here to tell you to buy American Eagle jeans, and I definitely won’t say that they’re the most comfortable jeans I’ve ever worn,” as said camera zooms in on her crotch and her ass. There is the girl-next-door scene, parodying Hollywood or porn, of Sweeney, this time in a cropped white button-down and wide-leg denim trousers, being filmed for an audition tape. A man, off camera, asks Sweeney to show him her hands, and she obeys. All the clips depict her as supplicant, including the one that you’ve likely already seen: Sweeney’s whole body lying supine as a kind of landscape, the camera panning over it, as she zips up her jeans, cooing, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” The camera arrives at its destination, her big blue eyes. “My genes are blue.” And then the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” (Another video shows a blond woman, presumably Sweeney, cheekily correcting a wheat-pasted poster that had read “Sydney Sweeney has great genes” to “jeans.”)

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