What Backlash? Sydney Sweeney Conforms to the Global Beauty Ideal

by Heather Widdows and Jessica Sutherland, University of Warwick

You’d have to be living off-grid to have missed the controversy about Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans advert. It began on social media and is now on every type of media: It's front-page news, podcast fodder, and has drawn political comment. It’s been called a promotion for white supremacy and eugenics, and even Nazi propaganda. While American Eagle has stated the advert is only about jeans, the company's stock has risen, and some have declared that Sweeney’s blonde hair and blue eyes represent a backlash against the trend for diversity in fashion.

A typical example of this was a discussion on the Channel 4 News program The Fourcast, chaired by Krishnan Guru-Murthy: “Is the ‘woke’ backlash killing body positivity?” (6 August 2024).[1] In the discussion, Megan Jayne Crabbe—described as a “writer, presenter and activist for body-positivity"—said “the thin white, blonde, blue-eyed figure is kind of looming as the ideal, once again.” Guru-Murthy suggested we might have gone back in time, to the 1990s or even the '30s. He said it “really feels like we’ve gone back in time where women don’t have agency over what is regarded as attractive, again.”

What world is he living in? When have women ever had agency over the beauty ideal?

Women have never had agency over their bodies, and with a dominant global ideal, we have less agency than ever before. Claims to diversity were never true, always a chimera, wishful thinking, hiding the fact that the beauty ideal is getting narrower and more demanding.

The global beauty ideal requires us to be thin, firm, smooth, and young. Young women, and increasingly men, are under overwhelming pressure to conform. Never before have we had a global ideal, and only a global ideal can normalize and naturalize and turn beauty practices—adornment practices—into health and hygiene practices. Sure, previous beauty ideals have been demanding—think foot-binding or corset wearing—but they were always beauty practices, about adornment or enhancement. The tiny lotus foot or the 19-inch waist could never be confused with what was normal, natural, or required. Women from different classes and different cultures didn’t do these things; they were natural and unadorned. With a global ideal, we’ve lost these points of comparison, these points of difference. Now the beauty ideal normalizes and naturalizes, and everyone is expected to conform.

The ideal is not a single blueprint: We don’t all have to be stereotypical Barbies, blonde and blue-eyed, but we do all have to be one of the Barbies. As I argued in Perfect Me:

“There is not a single acceptable hair color, eye color, height or weight… size can vary, you can be tall or short, petite or Amazonian, but you must be some version of slim; hair and style color can vary, but some evidence of grooming is required; breast size can vary, but pertness is desirable across sizes; and so the list goes on. Further, some aspects are more important in certain contexts than others, and features of the beauty ideal can be traded off against each other. For example, while golden or bronze skin is generally desired, very white and very dark skin is no barrier to being beautiful if you have attained the other features of the ideal” (2018, 20).

Thinness can come in different forms: “hourglass, thin with curves, athletic, ‘model-thin’ with ‘thigh gaps’” (2018, 21), but it is always required. For example, waists must be thin relative to breasts and hips: “‘muffin tops’ and ‘love handles’ are not features of any version of thinness’" (2018, 22).

The global ideal doesn’t care about hair or eye color but about firm, smooth, and young bodies that are thin in the right places. Sidney Sweeney absolutely fits these four criteria—and so does Beyonce, who has also done a jeans advert, as well as Kim Kardashian. The emerging global ideal is a “mixed ideal, which promotes a mix of racial and classed features, along with the ubiquitous promotion of youthfulness” (2018, 92).

While the ideal is mixed, for example, often requiring both curves and thinness, blonde has never gone away. The list of blonde actresses is endless: Cate Blanchett, Scarlett Johansson, Reese Witherspoon, Margot Robbie, Jennifer Lawrence, and Florence Pugh. Marilyn Monroe had to go blonde to succeed; Gen Z actors don’t (think Zendaya and Selena Gomez). So there is some diversity—but only diversity around skin, hair, and eye color—less and less diversity about body shape and size.

As we’ve written here before, body positivity was never that positive (Widdows and Sutherland, 2019).[2] It only ever challenged one of the four features of the beauty ideal—reinforcing rather than challenging it. Sydney Sweeney is thin, firm, smooth, and young—amazingly conforming. So, too, is every influencer, celebrity, and model. Even overt diversity campaigns are remarkably non-diverse. Remember the supposedly "trailblazing" British Vogue cover of 2018, claiming to be the height of body positivity?[3] A picture of nine up-and-coming models—no blonde, but one obviously white, one woman in a head scarf, and two plus-size models.

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"Nine future modelling superstars for a cover story that I hope defines everything we stand for"

Source: Vogue/Enninful

This is only one of the pictures taken by Craig McDean of “nine future modeling superstars for a cover story that I hope defines everything we stand for,” said Edward Enninful in the cover article for May’s British Vogue of 2018. He finishes the article by saying:

“One of the great positives of the past few months is the fashion industry finally embracing a concept that has defined my entire working life: diversity. When I say diversity, I want to be clear that it is never just about black and white for me. It’s about diversity across the board—whether that’s race, size, socio-economic background, religion, sexuality. That’s what I want to celebrate with this cover” (Enninful, 2018)

But is this really celebrating diversity? If we look closely, we will see that these models conform to the ideal. Nearly all are overtly thin, firm, smooth, and young. Two are bigger—but they are shapely and firm. They conform to the hourglass shape, emphasized by a belt. They are not fat and hairy and wrinkly and old. That really would be diverse.

And other features conform, too: Look at that firm and smooth "luminous" skin. Skin that is almost impossible in real life—unlike worms, humans don’t have bioluminescent skin, as we have written previously.[4] These models promote the global ideal.

As we’ve argued elsewhere, even the most body-positive campaigns only challenge one feature of the ideal at a time (Widdows and Sutherland, 2019).[5] Fat-positive campaigns only challenge the thin feature, body hair campaigns only the smooth feature, ageism campaigns only youth, and the list goes on. Sure, in this image, there is no blonde, but there is auburn with blue or green eyes. And the following month’s cover of British Vogue was—predictably—a blonde with blue-ish eyes: Cara Delevingne.

When it comes to Sweeney’s looks alone, there is no challenge to the global ideal, no backlash. The ideal is exceptionally demanding. It requires thin, firm, smooth, and young bodies… a body like hers.