Way back in the mists of time, before TikTok, before Bluesky, before pussy hats and the #Resistance, there used to be this thing whereby large companies would hire beautiful young women with bodies you could bounce pennies off and for large sums of money, said women would prance about showing off whatever products the company was selling – plus their own natural assets.
Brooke Shields wore Calvin Klein jeans. Cindy Crawford wore Revlon makeup. Kate Moss and Britney Spears drank milk. It went on all the way up until the 2000s, when Beyoncé looked stunning in a pair of Daisy Duke shorts and drank Pepsi. (This was just one Pepsi collab of many for Queen Bey.)
Anyhoo, things went in a different direction in the past few years, when craven corporate marketing execs with their fingers on zero pulses decided that, actually, what people hate is seeing hot chicks on television. So they put plus-sized bodies in Calvin Klein underwear. They put armpit-hair advocate and nepo-baby Ella Emhoff, the stepdaughter of Kamala Harris, on the runway. They tried to make Abercrombie and Fitch – famous for its chiselled, impossibly gorgeous store models – about ‘belonging, rather than fitting in’. Long story short, it didn’t work. So advertisers are reverting back to normal.
Last week, denim brand American Eagle released an ad campaign featuring film and television star Sydney Sweeney. In several different clips, she wears denim while driving a Mustang, while plastering her own billboard and while lounging around seductively, cooing about her ‘jeans’ – a double-entendre that refers not just to her attire but also to the body she was born with. In one clip, she says: ‘Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.’
It seems the campaign contains too much hotness for today’s younger generation of quivering malcontents. The outrage was immediate. The Washington Post ran an ‘analysis’ of the ad this week, blasting it as ‘tailored for the male gaze specifically’, ‘regressive’ and ‘tethered to the values of another time’. The Washington Post is correct on this last point. The ad campaign is indeed tethered to another time – when hot babes moved products, and no one, except for a few weirdos on college campuses, gave a shit.
TikTok’s response was even wilder. It quickly lit up with extraordinary claims that the American Eagle ad is actually a covert attempt to promote white supremacy. In one video, a woman proclaims it ‘weird’, as in ‘fascist weird’ and ‘Nazi propaganda weird’. And she’s not the only one. Apparently, there are many people out there unable to tell the difference between a beautiful blonde with great tits and goose-stepping genocidal maniacs. ‘This Americana bullshit’, another opines, is ‘Nazi shit’.
Do these kids know that Americans fought and won against ‘Nazi shit’ in the Second World War? That the essence of ‘Americana’ is the polar opposite to ‘Nazi shit’? Of course they don’t, because they were raised in a country that has turned on itself. This is tragic on many levels – not least of which is these people’s sense of unearned grievance and raging resentment.
Look, in some ways, I get it. I once tried on a pair of American Eagle jeans and couldn’t get them above my thighs. When I asked for the next size up, I was coolly informed by the male shop assistant that ‘Those are our roomiest jeans’. Didn’t feel great, I’ll admit. Moreover, I came of age in the era of aerobics and Baywatch. As girls, we obsessed over what size we were. It was tough to be a potato-bodied chick comparing myself with my thin-limbed peers. We could often be heard lamenting: ‘It’s the genes!’ But come on. It’s a bigger stretch than XXL jeggings to say this Sydney Sweeney advert is a Nazi dogwhistle, or a sly nod to eugenics.
The funniest thing about this non-story is that, by eighties and nineties standards, Sweeney is not a traffic-stopper. She’s obviously lovely in her own way, but compared with the glamazons who sold us stuff back in my youth, she’s practically homely. She’s a normal looking young woman with a fantastic rack and a very expensive make-up artist. And yet she’s provoking thinly veiled jealous rage all over the internet. That is how far the culture has shifted in just a few years.
No one will convince me that what passes for ‘left-wing discourse’ these days is anything more than just a bunch of spoiled, talentless brats who are enormously resentful of the cool kids. Leftism used to be a real political phenomenon. Now, it’s just revenge of the fat kids and nerds.
Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here
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