Are you bored with listening to in regards to the controversy over Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle denims advert? A outstanding factor about this newest culture-war dust-up is simply how a lot folks appear to resent its sheer existence. The entire thing feels, on its face, ginned up and foolish. A mall model determined to promote its denims by exhibiting them on a scorching blonde starlet, and swiftly the outrage mill is producing takes about how the adverts symbolize both the dying of woke or eugenics canine whistles — actually? That’s what we’re doing?
But there’s a shocking endurance to the story, in a means that implies there’s extra to it than meets the attention. Perhaps it’s due to the advert’s surreal interaction with Sweeney’s blonde bombshell picture, revealing how a lot weight that image nonetheless carries right this moment and the concepts it places ahead about sexuality, race, and gender.
In case you missed it: Final week, American Eagle launched a sequence of denims adverts with the tag line, “Sydney Sweeney has nice denims.” The marketing campaign facilities on a pun, a play on genes/denims. As Kyndall Cunningham put it for Vox, the large query was: “Are we purported to need pants or Aryan options?”
The outrage machine roared to life and has churned nonstop ever since then. Progressives denounced the adverts as Nazi propaganda whereas anti-woke varieties mocked liberals for calling folks Nazis in the event that they suppose Sydney Sweeney is scorching. By the top of the weekend, on-line sleuths had decided that Sweeney was a registered Republican as of 2024, and President Donald Trump reinvigorated the take cycle when he spoke out in assist of the actress.
It’s all rather a lot to put on a denims advert constructed round a nasty pun and a cute younger actress. But it’s not even the primary time that Sydney Sweeney and her physique have develop into the middle of a tradition conflict. Final yr, conservative commenters declared that Sweeney had “killed woke” when she hosted Saturday Evening Stay in a low-cut gown. In 2022, Sweeney was caught in a firestorm after she was photographed subsequent to MAGA-hat-wearing relations at her mom’s party.
Plenty of celebrities have been dinged for his or her political beliefs since Trump was first elected in 2016, however there’s one thing about Sweeney and the best way we speak about her that appears to draw political scrutiny. That one thing would possibly very properly be the potent symbols embedded in her “nice genes.” Her blonde hair, her blue eyes, her curves, the best way she presents the entire above to the digital camera.
Sydney Sweeney has spent most of her profession attempting to embody the American archetype of the blonde bombshell — and that’s a task that comes with baggage. It’s a extremely charged encapsulation of American fantasies and fears about white femininity: what a pleasant white girl ought to be, and what we’re afraid she is likely to be.
How Hollywood constructed a bombshell
“The largest false impression about me is that I’m a dumb blonde with massive tits,” Sweeney advised Glamour UK in 2023. Then the punchline: “I’m naturally brunette.”
Blonde bombshells have a protracted and storied historical past. Hollywood’s first, Jean Harlow, was additionally a bottle blonde. Beloved for her big-eyed comedian timing and her simple, expressive allure, Harlow first broke out within the Nineteen Thirties after Hollywood make-up artist Max Issue developed a platinum blonde hair shade for her. To the press, she was the blonde bombshell — so horny and so blonde that she might blow up a person’s life.
In 1933, Jean Harlow starred in a satire loosely based mostly on her life. LMPC by way of Getty Photos
In 1933, Harlow starred in Bombshell, a satire loosely based mostly on her personal life. (“Blonde,” the film poster helpfully added proper above the titlein case anybody wanted reminding that “blonde” and “bombshell” went collectively.) Harlow would keep her hair shade with a weekly utility of hydrogen peroxide and ammonia to the roots up till her tragic dying in 1937 on the age of 26.
If Harlow constructed the bombshell persona, Marilyn Monroe perfected it. Monroe too was a pure brunette, and he or she too went to Max Issue, who used an up to date model of Harlow’s platinum system to create Monroe’s signature look. Monroe’s legacy would develop into her picture because the blonde bombshell, the lady with intercourse attraction so potent it landed like a thrown bomb.
The bombshell’s blondeness classically signifies that the bombshell is white. Partly due to the second through which the archetype emerged, there’s a form of retro all-American pluck to her look: teased hair, massive, blue eyes, tanned white pores and skin that can pop in Technicolor. Her blondeness, highly effective and synthetic, appears to amplify her whiteness, nearly to burlesque it. It’s a part of her unique and racialized desirability: The bombshell is essentially the most enticing girl on the planet, and he or she is firmly, WASPily white.
The bombshell is hypersexual however harmless; highly effective however naive. She is each an empowering picture of female tender energy and a regressive conservative ideally suited: unapologetically sexual in a means that performs in opposition to puritanical norms; on the similar time girlish, compliant, unthreatening. The facility of her sexuality turns into unthreatening as a result of the blonde bombshell is just too silly and naive to ever use it in opposition to a watching man.
That’s a part of the joke of Sweeney’s “greatest false impression about me” line: The blonde bombshell is meant to be dumb. It’s a part of what makes her scorching.
It’s additionally a part of why the denims/genes advert conjures up such an odd combination of glee and discomfort in its watching viewers. When Sweeney lingers on her blondeness and her curves to evoke the bombshell, she’s invoking a strong archetype. The blonde bombshell comes with an affiliation of retro ’50s Americana that’s comforting for an viewers that imagines that America peaked within the postwar a long time. For one more viewers, much less highly effective than the nostalgia is the implied menace that comes with it: That is what good genes appear to be, and in case you deviate from the norm, you might be punished.
To be clear, there’s no cause to suppose Sweeney is clued into any of those malevolent implications when she exhibits off her curves in a denims advert. She likes to nod to Marilyn Monroe in her stylingin the identical means that a lot of actresses celebrated for his or her intercourse attraction do.
However the archetype is so highly effective which you can’t depart behind its baggage. The blonde bombshell embodies concepts of race and gender so completely that she appears to ask political readings. We develop into obsessive about Sweeney’s politics as a result of the political symbolism behind blonde bombshell is among the many most potent forces in American superstar.
