The Banal Provocation of Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans

Two American blondes have recently hawked denim. Beyoncé, an ambassador for Levi’s, dressed in outlaw drag, arrives at a semi-deserted laundromat. She slinks out of her 501s, revealing her white briefs to a couple of stunned onlookers. The jeans go in a waiting washing machine, to be tossed with diamonds instead of detergent pods. Under her cowboy hat-cum-crown, she is smiling knowingly. Her song “Levii’s Jeans” is playing. But what she’s selling in the commercial is not Levi’s. As I’ve written before, her project, in this “Cowboy Carter” era, has been to cast herself as the real patriot, a protector of this country’s traditions from the fraudulent claims of white supremacists. By “reimagining,” to paraphrase the ad copy of the Levi’s campaign, the classic advertisement “Launderette,” from 1985—which had its white male love object, Nick Kamen, strip down to his boxers—she is burnishing a heritage brand in her Black-queen image. Americana can be hers, too.