Good jeans? Why JD Vance is right about Sydney Sweeney

Sydney Sweeney probably lost me when she sold soap supposedly containing some of her own bathwater. We’d barely recovered from the bathtub scene in Saltburn when she released a limited edition soap called “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss”, at a bargain $12. This bliss flew into mailbags, with its “morning wood” scent of fir, moss, pine and a “touch” of her bathwater.

Mmmmm, germy bathwater. Of course, it sold out.

The woman who has the curvature of a 1950s pinup, and the wide-eyed stare of an ingénue, does not struggle to garner attention. And now she has taken part in a deliberately provocative ad for jeans that has inflamed the left, who see it as blatantly racist – or at the least very, very white – and thereby delighted the right.

A cute blonde, a sprinkle of race baiting and – bam! – the perfect ad has been created. And by perfect, I mean the kind that briefly galvanises outrage and jacks up share prices.

I know, it’s confusing. What happened is that Sweeney featured in an ad for American Eagle jeans where she played on the idea of good genes. As the tagline says, “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans”, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Genes too, if you like white, conventionally attractive people. I’d struggle to think of a more conventionally, stereotypically attractive white woman; actually, she’s almost cartoonishly hot.

As she pulls up her blue jeans on this ad, Sweeney says: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour.” She turns to the camera: “My jeans are blue.”

Which leads us to the rather obvious conclusion that “great genes” means white, blue-eyed and kinda Aryan. At a time when the current president has said there were “a lot of bad genes” in the United States, while discussing murders allegedly committed by illegal immigrants.

This did not go down well. A Tiktok by @thealtperspective, viewed 1.8 million times, summed up the reaction: “literally an ad FULL of racist and fascist dog whistles ... It’s literally being retweeted with ‘we’re so back’ by RACISTS.”

Then, the subsequent revelation that Sweeney had joined the Republican Party the day after Trump was convicted as a felon further excited onlookers. Most of all, Trump.

“She’s a registered Republican?” asked Trump. “Oh, now I love her ad.”

American Eagle shares leapt up 24 per cent after Trump said in a social media post that it was the “HOTTEST ad out there” and that the jeans were “flying off the shelves”. This is the greatest bump for the brand since 2000. “Go get ’em Sydney!” said Trump.

But the question for those who objected to the ad, elevated it, reposted it, dissected it, churned outrage through our feeds, is what they were trying to achieve. Yep, the ad is creepy and has a strong whiff of eugenics – but the outcome seems to have been profit for the brand they’re seeking to discredit. In an attention economy, surely the important question is what we pay attention to.

Not that it’s wrong to criticise the ad, nor to point out the racist overtones – especially given this is a time of real erosion of DEI in Hollywood and elsewhere – but you’d have to question devoting so much time to something that plays into the marketer’s hands.

On the Ruthless podcast, JD Vance said: “My political advice to the Democrats is continue to tell everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi. That appears to be their actual strategy.

“I mean, it actually reveals something pretty interesting about the Dems, though, which is that you have, like, a normal all-American beautiful girl doing like a normal jeans ad … and they have managed to so unhinge themselves over this thing. And it’s like, you guys, did you learn nothing from the November 2024 election?”

Honestly, apart from his lack of acknowledgment of the ad’s actual connotations, it’s a fair point. Even the fact that Sweeney’s dog is a German Shepherd has been leapt upon as a latent sign of Nazism.

When I asked my ABC colleague Jeremy Fernandez about this story this week on the Not Stupid podcast, he said: “As a brown person, this doesn’t look any different to the undercurrent of any other denim ad that I’ve seen. Think of brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Abercrombie and Fitch; ‘beautiful white people’.

“To me this might seem like a bit of a storm in a teacup because it’s really just putting words out there for what has always been there. They are just saying it out loud. I’ve noticed this for years. It’s a well-known marketing trope.

“Is it uncomfortable? Yeah. Is a bit – ugh? Yeah. But I don’t know if the scale of the reaction to this particular ad belies the fact that this has gone on since the dawn of marketing.”

Lots of other marketing campaigns are race-based, he says. “There are some people who found it really offensive, and I can appreciate their point of view. But it is Marketing 101. I don’t find it particularly surprising.”

Which is probably why The New Yorker called it a “banal provocation”. Doreen St Felix wrote that the outrage quickly “dissipated into a bored fatigue”.

To Jeremy’s point, another ad has since come out with a white person boasting about superior genes. At which point you’d have to agree with Kathleen Newman-Bremang, who wrote in Refinery29 that it’s time to “say the quiet part out loud: bragging about white people’s genetics in the year 2025 is f---ing weird. I don’t care what you’re promoting.”

In response to it all, and doubtless rubbing their hands in glee, American Eagle issued a statement on social media: “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story.” The company said it would celebrate how everyone wears its jeans “with confidence, their way”.

“Great jeans look good on everyone,” America Eagle pronounced.

Sure. It’s just that we’re told, again and again, that they look a heck of a lot better on Sydney Sweeney, who just happens to have white skin and blue eyes. Such a coincidence.

Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist.

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