Are you tired of hearing about the controversy over Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans ad? A remarkable thing about this latest culture-war dust-up is just how much people seem to resent its sheer existence. The whole thing feels, on its face, ginned up and silly. A mall brand decided to advertise its jeans by showing them on a hot blonde starlet, and all of a sudden the outrage mill is generating takes about how the ads symbolize either the death of woke or eugenics dog whistles — really? That’s what we’re doing?
Yet there’s a surprising staying power to the story, in a way that suggests there’s more to it than meets the eye. Maybe it’s because of the ad’s surreal interplay with Sweeney’s blonde bombshell image, revealing how much weight that symbol still carries today and the ideas it puts forward about sexuality, race, and gender.
In case you missed it: Last week, American Eagle released a series of jeans ads with the tag line, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The campaign centers on a pun, a play on genes/jeans. As Kyndall Cunningham put it for Vox, the big question was: “Are we supposed to want pants or Aryan features?”
The outrage machine roared to life and has churned nonstop ever since then. Progressives denounced the ads as Nazi propaganda while anti-woke types mocked liberals for calling people Nazis if they think Sydney Sweeney is hot. By the end of the weekend, online sleuths had determined that Sweeney was a registered Republican as of 2024, and President Donald Trump reinvigorated the take cycle when he spoke out in support of the actress.
It’s all quite a lot to lay on a jeans ad built around a bad pun and a cute young actress. Yet it’s not even the first time that Sydney Sweeney and her body have become the center of a culture war. Last year, conservative commenters declared that Sweeney had “killed woke” when she hosted Saturday Night Live in a low-cut dress. In 2022, Sweeney was caught in a firestorm after she was photographed next to MAGA-hat-wearing family members at her mother’s birthday party.
Lots of celebrities have been dinged for their political opinions since Trump was first elected in 2016, but there’s something about Sweeney and the way we talk about her that seems to attract political scrutiny. That something might very well be the potent symbols embedded in her “great genes.” Her blonde hair, her blue eyes, her curves, the way she presents all of the above to the camera.
Sydney Sweeney has spent most of her career trying to embody the American archetype of the blonde bombshell — and that’s a role that comes with baggage. It’s a highly charged encapsulation of American fantasies and fears about white femininity: what a nice white lady should be, and what we are afraid she might be.
How Hollywood built a bombshell
“The biggest misconception about me is that I am a dumb blonde with big tits,” Sweeney told Glamour UK in 2023. Then the punchline: “I’m naturally brunette.”
Blonde bombshells have a long and storied history. Hollywood’s first, Jean Harlow, was also a bottle blonde. Beloved for her big-eyed comic timing and her easy, expressive charm, Harlow first broke out in the 1930s after Hollywood makeup artist Max Factor developed a platinum blonde hair color for her. To the press, she was the blonde bombshell — so sexy and so blonde that she could blow up a man’s life.
In 1933, Harlow starred in Bombshell, a satire loosely based on her own life. (“Blonde,” the movie poster helpfully added right above the title, in case anyone needed reminding that “blonde” and “bombshell” went together.) Harlow would maintain her hair color with a weekly application of hydrogen peroxide and ammonia to the roots up until her tragic death in 1937 at the age of 26.
If Harlow built the bombshell persona, Marilyn Monroe perfected it. Monroe too was a natural brunette, and she too went to Max Factor, who used an updated version of Harlow’s platinum formula to create Monroe’s signature look. Monroe’s legacy would become her image as the blonde bombshell, the woman with sex appeal so potent it landed like a thrown bomb.
The bombshell’s blondeness classically means that the bombshell is white. In part because of the moment in which the archetype emerged, there is a kind of retro all-American pluck to her look: teased hair, big, blue eyes, tanned white skin that will pop in Technicolor. Her blondeness, powerful and artificial, seems to amplify her whiteness, almost to burlesque it. It’s part of her exclusive and racialized desirability: The bombshell is the most attractive woman in the world, and she is firmly, WASPily white.
The bombshell is hypersexual but innocent; powerful but naive. She is both an empowering image of feminine soft power and a regressive conservative ideal: unapologetically sexual in a way that plays against puritanical norms; at the same time girlish, compliant, unthreatening. The power of her sexuality becomes unthreatening because the blonde bombshell is too stupid and naive to ever use it against a watching man.
That’s part of the joke of Sweeney’s “biggest misconception about me” line: The blonde bombshell is supposed to be dumb. It’s part of what makes her hot.
It’s also part of why the jeans/genes ad inspires such a strange mixture of glee and discomfort in its watching audience. When Sweeney lingers on her blondeness and her curves to evoke the bombshell, she’s invoking a powerful archetype. The blonde bombshell comes with an association of retro ’50s Americana that’s comforting for an audience that imagines that America peaked in the postwar decades. For another audience, less powerful than the nostalgia is the implied threat that comes with it: This is what good genes look like, and if you deviate from the norm, you can be punished.
To be clear, there’s no reason to think Sweeney is clued into any of these malevolent implications when she shows off her curves in a jeans ad. She likes to nod to Marilyn Monroe in her styling, in the same way that lots of actresses celebrated for their sex appeal do.
But the archetype is so powerful that you can’t leave behind its baggage. The blonde bombshell embodies ideas of race and gender so thoroughly that she seems to invite political readings. We become obsessed with Sweeney’s politics because the political symbolism behind blonde bombshell is among the most potent forces in American celebrity.