Making America hot again: Aesthetic politics,from Walter Benjamin to Sydney Sweeney

I

In 2025, US jeans brand American Eagle released a campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney in a series of video and still image advertisements, all of which culminate in the punning tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” In the current political climate, any advertisement ascribing genetic superiority to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned actress, however playfully, is likely to raise eyebrows. However, one instalment of the campaign, which I will dub the “great jeans” ad, proved especially controversial. In this spot, the camera pans along Sweeney’s prostrate body as she buttons up a pair of blue jeans and her husky voice intones: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour . . . my jeans are blue.” The closing title card (“SYDNEY SWEENEY HAS GREAT JEANS”) does not resolve the semiotic slipperiness of this monologue, as a male voice-over’s repetition of the slogan conflates the homonymous jeans and genes. Like the notorious 1980 Calvin Klein commercial it references, this ad taps into the discursive residues of eugenics: it begins with a general remark about the heritability of traits such as eye colour; pivots to the more pointed claim that “[Sweeney’s] jeans/genes are blue”—a line the viewer is prompted to read as a reference to her eyes, since the camera lingers on them while her earlier mention of eye colour reverberates; and concludes with the voice-over’s authoritative declaration that, presumably by virtue of her blue jeans/eyes, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans/genes.” Yet the fact that these links are forged not through explicit statement but through a metonymic chain of associations leaves the ad deliberately—perhaps even strategically—ambiguous.

Audiences for the ad fell obediently into the polarised interpretive camps structured by the ad’s “strategic ambiguity” (Bauer and Zirker, 2023: 1). Left-coded commentators dubbed it a fascist dog whistle, claiming that the ad smuggles race science into the sphere of lifestyle marketing to curry favour with the “anti-woke” constituency that has recently converged around Sweeney (Ali, 2025; Holland, 2025; Mouriquand, 2025; Zhang, 2025). This critique triggered a predictably indignant backlash from pundits on the right, who accused the left of reacting hysterically to the harmless spectacle of “a hot girl in jeans” (Arbour, 2025). From this perspective, the ad is simply a light-hearted celebration of denim, enriched by Sweeney’s physical appeal and leavened with a series of innocuous puns (although, not coincidentally, many of these voices belonged to commentators who had initially celebrated the ad as a victory for the MAGA movement). These reactions, of course, unfold against a larger backdrop. For the left, beauty itself has become a suspect category (Snider, 2018: 337), identified with privilege, exclusion, and hierarchy. For the right, meanwhile, beauty has become a rallying-cry, as epitomised by the so-called “Make America Hot Again” movement—a counteroffensive valorisation of traditional beauty ideals that spans social media commentary, advertising, YouTube videos, Substack columns, live events and merchandising.

This article seeks to adjudicate between these two competing interpretations of the “great jeans” ad. Rejecting the well-rehearsed opposition between ideological vehicle and apolitical spectacle, I outline a third, more nuanced way of reading this text by revisiting a concept that is often invoked in discussion of right-wing mobilisations of aesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s “aesthetic politics.” Introduced in Benjamin’s 1930 review of a volume edited by the fascist commentator Ernst Jünger (1930), the concept was further elaborated in the concluding paragraphs of the 1936 version of the famous “Work of Art” essay (2008). There, Benjamin (2008: 41) distinguishes the “aestheticization of politics,” which he associates with fascism, from what he identifies as its opposite, namely, the “politicizatiz[ation of] art,” which he identifies with “communism” and which sought to make art itself a site of political struggle in the service of left-wing politics. Across later Marxist and post-Marxist thought—from the Frankfurt School’s analysis of the culture industry (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002), to Bourdieu’s (1979) analysis of culture’s role in reinforcing class distinction and Rancière’s (2013) “distribution of the sensible” (p. 7)—arguments about what is often called “political aesthetics” have come to figure the aesthetic not as a retreat from politics, but as one of its most powerful terrains. Today, the term “political aesthetic” describes any aesthetic or cultural form through which ideology is encoded and transmitted.

As I will show, Benjamin’s account of aesthetic politics has yielded two equally popular, but wholly distinct, readings of aesthetic politics and its relationship to the question of art’s autonomy and disinterestedness. The first argues that aesthetic politics subscribes to a l’art pour l’art conception of aesthetics, which it then misguidedly applies to the political field. In this view, there is a firm opposition between aesthetic politics and political aesthetics. The second, by contrast, casts it as an aesthetically-charged form of political persuasion and thus renders it structurally indistinguishable from political aesthetics. Having outlined these polarised readings of Benjamin’s aesthetic politics, I will apply them to the great jeans ad while suggesting that each reading corresponds to one of the two popular responses to the ad. Yet, as I will further argue, neither of these readings adequately captures the dialectical structure of Benjamin’s model, which, somewhat paradoxically, identifies aesthetic politics as the instrumental deployment of l’art pour l’art aesthetics itself. This dialectical view of Benjamin’s influential concept helps us better grasp the nature of the distinction between political aesthetics and aesthetic politics as it pertains to questions of aesthetic autonomy. Recognising this dialectic, in turn, suggests that the left’s suspicion of the great jeans ad and the right’s dismissal of that suspicion are interlocking interpretative reflexes of the same aesthetic–political mechanism.

II

One dominant reading of Benjamin’s aesthetic politics describes it in terms of the misguided transposition of a l’art pour l’art conception of the aesthetic into the political sphere. According to intellectual historian Martin Jay, for example, Benjamin’s “aesthetic politics” involves two defining features. The first is a l’art pour l’art interpretation of aesthetics that, unlike many other accounts of the phenomenon, brackets it off from other domains by setting “a realm called art” apart from “other human pursuits, cognitive, religious, ethical, economic, or whatever” (Jay, 1992: 43). This conception of aesthetics aligns closely with a Kantian framework, which casts aesthetic pleasure as gratuitous and “non-purposive” (1987: 61), arising exclusively from the formal harmony of an object without reference to moral, practical or political ends. The second key feature of Benjamin’s view of aesthetic politics, according to Jay, is the unrolling of this peculiar l’art pour l’art vision of art across the political field. For Jay (1992), this misapplication of l’art pour l’art aesthetics to the political sphere is morally “repel[lant]” because of the extent to which “nonaesthetic criteria are deliberately and provocatively excluded from consideration” (p. 44) in a context in which such criteria should be paramount. While Jay doesn’t touch on the aesthetic politics/political aesthetics distinction, this vision of aesthetic politics diverges in clear and conspicuous ways from a political aesthetics that, in the words of cultural historian Stollmann and Smith (1978), forms part of an established “path from autonomous art . . . to socialism” (p. 51). A similar account of Benjamin’s (1994) aesthetic politics appears in the work of intellectual historian Richard Wolin (1984), who argues that “Benjamin interprets fascism’s aesthetics of violence . . . as the culmination of l’art pour l’art” (p. 184). Through this lens, aesthetic politics can be firmly distinguished from a “political aesthetic” that, in Wolin’s words, would “mobilize the so-called forces of aesthetic production to political ends” (Benjamin, 1994: 184).

This l’art pour l’art view of Benjamin’s aesthetic politics can be productively applied to the “eye-colour” ad, which foregrounds Sweeney’s beauty while framing that beauty as a source of gratuitous, disinterested pleasure—if not necessarily pleasure of an exclusively aesthetic kind. Cinematography is central to the ad’s cultivation of this sense of spontaneous, non-instrumental enjoyment: as the camera pans slowly up Sweeney’s denim-clad legs towards her torso, chest and face, it invites viewers to luxuriate in the spectacle of her body. The supposed “non-purposive[ness]” (Kant, 1987: 61) of this pleasure is further reinforced by the fact that, as a blonde-haired, white skinned, blue-eyed woman, Sweeney is racially “unmarked” (Chambers, 1996: 142) and thus registers as more politically “neutral” than a non-white model would be. No one, it suggests, could accuse the campaign of leveraging her for political effect (unless, of course, they could—and did). Admittedly, this “pure aesthetic” (Bourdieu, 1979: 5) has significant consequences beyond the aesthetic realm. On one level, it arguably perpetuates rigid beauty norms that marginalise those who violate them, producing psychic and social harm. On another, and as I will explain in detail later, this aesthetic plays an important role in facilitating the ad’s invocation of the language of race science. Yet, in the version of Benjamin’s aesthetic politics outlined by Jay and Wolin, these consequences are incidental and unintended by-products of a commitment to beauty that can be justly accused of causing harm, but not of actively facilitating it. As this suggests, this l’art pour l’art account of aesthetic politics diverges markedly from standard accounts of political aesthetics.

Yet if Jay and Wolin define aesthetic politics in terms of the exclusion of non-aesthetic considerations, other scholars define it in terms of its embrace of these same considerations. In this line of argument, the political, social and bodily impacts of aesthetic politics are far from mere collateral damage; in fact, they are the entire point. International security studies scholar Hansen (2018: 599), for example, rejects an art for art’s sake account of the aesthetic, identifying it, instead, with any kind of “visual communication,” including those that are explicitly ideologically charged. She then (Hansen, 2018: 599) proceeds to meditate on the inherent “dangers of such [aesthetic] spectacles” in political contexts, arguing that, “In Benjamin’s case, political aesthetics refers to how politicians—and others—use images and texts to create and enforce myths about national and individual superiority and power.” Other Benjamin scholars advance similarly instrumentalist readings of aesthetic politics. According to Koepnick (1999), for example, “it is not the excess of aesthetics—independent sensory experience—but the lack of it that makes fascism totalitarian and defines what Benjamin calls the aestheticization of politics” (p. 4). Koepnick’s argument differs from Hansen’s in one important way: he equates the aesthetic with the pure or autonomous aesthetic (what he calls “independent sensory experience”). However, his account ultimately converges with hers. This is because, for Koepnick, aesthetic politics is characterized not by the imposition of an autonomous model of art on the political, but by the production of cultural forms that “lack” this autonomy and that fully subordinate the aesthetic to political ends. ¹ Importantly, where “aesthetic politics” is read this way, the distinction between aesthetic politics and political aesthetics collapses, especially in terms of their respective relation to questions of autonomy. Of course, this instrumentalist perspective on aesthetic politics does not preclude other significant differences between the two concepts (Stollman [1978], for example, differentiates aesthetic politics and political aesthetics on the grounds that one seeks to reinforce the status quo while the other seeks to upend it (p. 51)). However, in the instrumentalist view, aesthetic politics and political aesthetics are equally didactic or propagandistic.

Revisiting the great jeans ad suggests that, just as it lends itself to the l’art pour l’art account of aesthetic politics, so it lends itself to this more instrumentalist account. Interpreting the ad through this latter lens aligns with its existing left-coded reception, which focuses on the use of language that hints at the superiority of white skin and blue eyes. From this perspective, the seemingly innocuous emphasis on “good jeans” trades on a historically charged visual and linguistic repertoire that has long served to naturalise racial hierarchies. Yet how far do the two dominant readings of Benjamin’s aesthetic politics take us in illuminating the dynamics at play here? In many respects, as we have seen, these two interpretations of Benjamin’s concept of aesthetic politics line up neatly with the deadlocked readings of the great jeans advertisement, and this convergence should give us pause. Is it possible, then, to move past these competing interpretations of Benjamin’s aesthetic politics? And if so, how might such a move help us explain—and transcend—the polarised responses to the great jeans advertisement? How, in turn, might it sharpen our understanding of the relationship between aesthetic politics and political aesthetics more broadly?

III

In returning to Benjamin to answer these questions, it is worth noting that he does provide grounds for the l’art pour l’art interpretation of aesthetic politics offered by Jay and Wolin, in which aesthetic politics involves the misguided application of a l’art pour l’art vision of aesthetics to non-art realms such as politics or war. In his earliest observations on the topic, Benjamin identifies this dynamic in the romanticisation of war at play in the Jünger collection, which he describes as “nothing other than an uninhibited translation of the principles of l’art pour l’art to war itself” (Benjamin, 1979: 122) in what Benjamin views as a terrifying elision of the extra-aesthetic concerns that one would usually expect to prevail in this context. Thus, as Benjamin (1979) notes, for the authors of the volume in question, “ ‘it is of secondary importance in which century, for which ideas, and with which weapons the fighting is done’” (p. 120). Instead of the broader stakes and costs of war, he suggests, the authors are more concerned with the sartorial self-presentation of the soldiers, giving “one the impression that the uniform represents their highest end . . . and that the circumstances under which one dons the uniform are of little importance by comparison” (Benjamin, 1979: 121).

Several years later, in the “Work of Art” essay, Benjamin reiterates and extends this discussion of the l’art pour l’art aspect of aesthetic politics. Widening the scope of his argument from war to politics in general, with the claim that “the logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life” (Benjamin, 2008: 41), he presents fascism as a regime that elevates aesthetics over substantive political participation. He then revisits the example of war, which he identifies as the “culminat[ion]” of this logic: “all efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war” (Benjamin, 2008: 41). Here, too, the l’art pour l’art rubric is central to Benjamin’s analysis. Characterising war as the “consummation of l’art pour l’art,” he quotes the Futurist maxim “Fiat ars-pereat mundus” (“make art, if the world perish”) as emblematic of this orientation: “ ‘Fiat ars-pereat mundus,’ says fascism, expecting from war, as [Italian futurist poet Filippo] Marinetti admits, the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology” (Benjamin, 2008: 42). This l’art pour l’art framing of aesthetic politics lends itself to a firm distinction between Benjamin’s aesthetic politics and political aesthetics in terms of their respective relationship to aesthetic autonomy. Building on this model, it should come as no surprise that, in the final paragraph of the “Work of Art” essay, Benjamin (2008) directly opposes the two terms: “Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art” (p. 42).

Yet while Benjamin’s writing appears to support Jay and Wolin’s contention that aesthetic politics involves a l’art pour l’art indifference to extra-aesthetic concerns, it also does the obverse, repeatedly suggesting that aesthetic politics is deeply invested in extra-aesthetic effects. However, in Benjamin’s account, the nature of this investment is complex; Benjamin’s model of aesthetic politics is certainly not reducible to Hansen’s (2018) view that, in aesthetic politics, aesthetics serves directly “to create and enforce myths” about “national and individual superiority and power” (p. 599). On the contrary, I will show that, perhaps paradoxically, Benjamin insists on the instrumental use of l’art pour l’art aesthetics itself. In particular, I will argue that, according to Benjamin, aesthetic politics uses aesthetic spectacle to (1) distract from the political, (2) disavow the political, and (3) divert collective energy that might otherwise be directed towards the political.

To turn to the first of these claims first, Benjamin advances this argument near the top of the final section of the “Work of Art” essay:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses-but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them [aesthetic] expression in keeping these relations unchanged (Benjamin WA, 41).

This passage is striking for the subtle indirection with which it connects political economy, on the one hand and fascist aesthetic spectacle (rallies, parades, the pageantry of war) on the other. Rather than proposing a straightforward scenario in which aesthetic spectacle serves as a vehicle for politics, the conjunctions “while” and “but” frame them as separate, if simultaneous, phenomena. Yet these conjunctions also imply a contrast between the two phenomena, hinting that this difference might enable the latter to distract from or veil the former. In this view, fascist aesthetic politics does not involve the direct, instrumental use of aesthetics to champion unequal social relations. Instead, it involves the promotion of a l’art pour l’art aesthetics to distract from the ongoing purchase of these unequal social relations (Fenves, 2005: 62; Richards, 2025: 11). As Peter Fenves glosses this, “The aestheticizing of the political corresponds to a time in which the ‘masses’ are deprived of their rights and are given the opportunity for ‘expression’ instead” (p. 62). By these lights, aesthetic expression functions neither as pure art nor as political propaganda, but as a treacherous substitute for politics that sustains exploitative social relations precisely by focusing attention on l’art pour l’art aesthetic spectacle.

If, for Benjamin, the l’art pour l’art aesthetic spectacle serves as a mechanism for distracting from the political, it also helps disavow the political. Consider, for example, this crucial moment in Benjamin’s (1979) “Theories of German Fascism”: immediately after describing “this new [fascist] theory of war” as “nothing other than an uninhibited translation of the principles of l’art pour l’art to war itself” (p. 122), Benjamin offers a series of illustrative quotes from the authors of the book under review before contending that one couldn’t “imagine a veteran of the Marne or someone who fought at Verdun reading statements such as these” (p. 122). The point is not that the aestheticising approach to war modelled by Junger’s volume is tactless (an observation that would be consistent with Jay’s emphasis on aesthetic politics’ “indifference” to its negative externalities). Rather, the point is that this approach is disingenuous, that “falser notes could hardly be sounded” (Benjamin, 1979: 122). This suggests that the aestheticization of politics is neither a flight into an autonomous aesthetic domain, nor a purely instrumental deployment of aesthetics for political purposes. Instead, it represents the instrumental deployment of the rhetoric of autonomy itself—l’art pour l’art—as a strategy of political disavowal.

Yet if, in Benjamin’s view, the l’art pour l’art spectacle serves to distract from and disavow the political work of fascism, it also serves to channel the masses’ energies into something other than class-based political conflict. This claim comes to the fore when Benjamin explains that the aesthetics of “war” forms a key part of the process, that “War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations” (Benjamin, 2008: 41). This is because “only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technological resources while maintaining property relations” (Benjamin, 2008: 41). From Benjamin’s perspective, the “natural use of productive forces” (factories, energy, transport) has the capacity to liberate the masses by reorganising production. However, this potential is intolerable from the perspective of existing property relations; as Benjamin puts it, the “natural use of productive forces is impeded by the property system” (Benjamin, 2008: 42). The value of war, then, lies in the way in which it diverts the potentially liberatory potential of technology into the service of spectacular destruction: “Instead of deploying power stations across the land, society deploys manpower in the form of armies. Instead of promoting air traffic, it promotes traffic in shells. And in gas warfare it has found a new means of abolishing the aura” (Benjamin, 2008: 42). To the extent that war offers the opportunity for technologically-enabled aesthetic spectacle, it serves neither as a l’art pour l’art spectacle that is indifferent to exploitative capitalist labour and property relations, nor as propagandistic spectacle intended to reinforce those relations directly. Instead, it serves to cement those relations indirectly by diverting the technological and creative energies that might otherwise be turned towards dismantling them into ecstatic, self-annihilating aesthetic display.

For Benjamin, the deployment of l’art pour l’art aesthetics within the framework of aesthetic politics simultaneously distracts from, disavows, and redirects attention away from the political. This reading of Benjamin’s aesthetic politics undermines the conventional opposition between l’art pour l’art aesthetics and politically motivated aesthetics. In fact, through this lens, the art for art’s sake promise of the “pure aesthetic” is the very mechanism through which politically motivated aesthetics operates.

This dialectical reading of Benjamin’s aesthetic politics has significant implications for the great jeans advertisement. From this perspective, the moments in the ad that most readily prompt claims that it’s “just a hot girl in jeans”—its languorous lighting, sensuous camera movements, and self-conscious pleasure in Sweeney’s appearance—are, paradoxically, the most politically consequential, functioning to distract, disavow, and divert attention from the ad’s political agenda. First, these moments of l’art pour l’art spectacle distract from the political work the ad simultaneously performs. Second, they function as a form of disavowal, the fabled “disinterestedness” of the “pure aesthetic” allowing defenders to wave away the ideological work of the ad by insisting that there is “nothing to see here.” Third, they divert into “pure aesthetic” contemplation the attention of those who might otherwise question or critique the unequal racial hierarchies the ad subtly reinforces. What appears as a self-contained aesthetic experience thus serves not to suspend extra-aesthetic goals, but to provide their alibi and instrument. Another key instalment of the “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign explicitly foregrounds the logic of disavowal at the heart of the great jeans ad. This second ad positions Sweeney in a dimly lit set. As she moves through her marks—seated in a blue chair, pacing the room, pausing to pose before a mirror, turning flirtatiously towards the camera, returning to her seat—she delivers the following to-camera monologue:

I’m not here to tell you to buy American Eagle jeans. And I definitely won’t say that they’re the most comfortable jeans I’ve ever worn—or that they make your butt look amazing. Why would I need to do that? But if you said that you wanted to buy the jeans, I’m not going to stop you. But, just so we’re clear, this is not me telling you to buy American Eagle jeans. You see what I did there, right?

At the heart of the monologue is Sweeney’s insistence that she isn’t going to make standard marketing claims about the comfort or fit of American Eagle jeans. This disavowal of the promotional work of the ad mirrors the widespread right-wing disavowal of the political work of the ad (as in the US Vice President’s insistence that it is just “a pretty girl doing a jeans ad” [quoted in Hibberd, 2025]). Yet the interest of the ad lies in the obvious disjunction between the ad’s claims and its effects. This takes the form of a tension within the monologue, where Sweeney’s act of declaring that she will not endorse the jeans becomes a way of smuggling that endorsement into circulation. But it also takes the form of a tension between the monologue, which repudiates promotional rhetoric, and the visual field, which enacts that promotional rhetoric on her behalf. When Sweeney announces that she “won’t say [the jeans] make your butt look amazing,” the camera zooms in on her rear, deliberately rendering such a statement redundant. The subsequent line—“Why would I need to do that?”—signals, with a knowing wink, that the image track has already achieved the promotional goals that the audio track repudiates. In this sense, the ad performs a kind of ironic confession, gleefully exposing the disavowal at the core of the great jeans ad’s rhetoric.

IV

With an eye to resolving the impasse in the reception of the American Eagle eye-colour advertisement, this essay has revisited Benjamin’s “aesthetic politics,” a concept that—much like the ad itself—has attracted polarised misreadings. As I have shown, Benjamin’s aesthetic politics is best understood neither as the political instrumentalization of aesthetic form, nor as a retreat into “pure” aestheticism in which political realities are merely unfortunate externalities. Rather, for Benjamin, aesthetic politics strategically mobilises the rhetoric and affect of l’art pour l’art—purity, disinterest, sensuous absorption—to advance its political aims. This reframing of the role of aesthetics in Benjamin’s aesthetic politics reshapes our understanding of the relationship between aesthetic politics and political aesthetics more broadly by suggesting that these cannot be understood as distinct or opposed categories. Instead, in this analysis, aesthetic politics is best understood as a form of political aesthetics that occludes its status as such, progressing its political goals through the strategic use of aesthetic autonomy as a tool of disavowal, distraction and diversion. The line between aesthetic politics and political aesthetics, in other words, is not ontological but performative. Yet the fact that this boundary is, in a sense, “fake” does not render it trivial. As Žižek (2009) reminds us, pretence is never superficial; the as-if is often the precise mechanism through which ideological structures materialise and endure (p. 36). Aesthetic politics’ insistence on posing as disinterested aestheticism is precisely what distinguishes it from political aesthetics proper.

Useful in itself, this account of Benjamin’s aesthetic politics also helps us “resolve” the impasse in popular responses to the notorious great jeans advertisement. In particular, it helps us recognise that the polarised readings the ad provoked—the left’s insistence that it is a fascist dog whistle and the right’s insistence that it is harmless, apolitical fun—are structured by the complex logic of aesthetic politics, with each camp mistaking a partial perspective for the whole. The right-coded reading buys into the ad’s claims of aesthetic autonomy, invoking the concept of beauty in ways that actively overlook the political work that that beauty performs. Yet the left’s denunciation of the ad is no less limited, treating the aesthetic as a cynical mask that must be stripped away to reveal an underlying political truth. Both readings, then, accept the premise that the aesthetic and the political are separable domains. To move beyond this deadlock, we must follow Benjamin in abandoning the search for a “real” politics concealed behind the façade of aesthetic autonomy and instead recognise that the ad’s performance of autonomy is the mechanism of its political efficacy. Such a shift reorients the terrain of critique, from asking whether an aesthetic object is political or not to asking how its disavowal of politics performs its most consequential political work.