In 2025, as part of a broader campaign built around the punning slogan “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” US denim brand American Eagle released an advertisement that paired the tagline with a subtle reference to Sweeney’s blue eyes and a less subtle meditation on genetic inheritance. The ad quickly became a flashpoint in the online culture wars. Left-leaning commentators condemned it as a fascist dog whistle, while right-leaning pundits dismissed it as the harmless spectacle of “a hot girl in jeans.” In an effort to move beyond this impasse, this essay revisits Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aesthetic politics,” a concept that—like the Sweeney-American Eagle ad—has provoked polarised interpretations. Against readings that cast aesthetic politics as either a flight into an autonomous aesthetic domain, or as a purely instrumental deployment of aesthetics for political purposes, I argue that for Benjamin, aesthetic politics strategically mobilises the rhetoric and affect of l’art pour l’art to disguise the instrumental aims it simultaneously serves. Read in this light, the now-notorious American Eagle ad is neither apolitical spectacle nor white supremacist provocation. Rather, both responses arise from—and are sustained by—the aesthetic–political mechanism Benjamin describes.
Pansy Duncan (Mon,) studied this question.