New Yorker: Let's Not Talk About Sydney Sweeney!

Let's talk instead about somebody who is really relevant and up to date: Beyoncé

At The New Yorker, a black lady DEI hire is irate that people are talking about 27-year-old Sydney Sweeney instead of … 43-year-old Beyoncé:

The Banal Provocation of Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans

The American Eagle campaign, with its presentation of Americana as a zombie slop of mustangs, denim, and good genes, is lowest-common-denominator stuff.

By Doreen St. Félix

August 2, 2025

… 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.

It's fascinating how you are supposed to believe that Beyoncé, who became famous in the 1990s, is still cutting edge in 2025. By this point, she's been around longer than Frank Sinatra had been when the Beatles arrived.

Have the cultural backpages of the prestige press ever been less interesting? The left assumes that their Racial Reckoning is still interesting, while the right hasn’t yet started to make much interesting art.