There’s an image that, for me, encapsulates the 2010s. It’s a 2017 New York City billboard for the millennial-pink beauty brand Glossier, itself an offshoot of the 2010-founded, highly-addictive beauty blog Into The Gloss. The ad features the multiracial plus-size American model Paloma Elsesser, nude, but with the shot covering the relevant bits, such that it shows nothing more than your typical swimsuit ad.
The reason the image has stuck with me all this time is not that it was my one time seeing a scantily-clad woman on a billboard. (This is what is called, in the West, a billboard.) Nor was this the only 2010s instance of a woman in an ad whose body differs from the lithe blonde beauty standards from the eras before and after. Hardly! Those years were banner times for a pivot from the very publications that had been making women and girls feel bad about how they looked. Harper’s Bazaar of 2020 was introducing readers to “12 Stunning Black Plus-Size Models You Need to Know,” and I don’t need to Google it to remember that mainstream fashion magazines of 1995 or 2005 were doing nothing of the kind. If anything, the cool-girl brands, the if-you-know-you ones, identified themselves by hiring unconventional-looking models (older, fatter, hairier, androgynous, visibly disabled, and yes, racially diverse).
The fact of Elsesser being in a Glossier ad was itself emblematic of the moment, but not the whole of why I remember it so well. Rather, it’s the angle. It’s a front-and-side shot of Elsesser crouched, so as to showcase every skin fold. Every bit of midsection it is conventional for a woman to, if anything, suck in for a photograph.
Given that fashion photography (and just, photographs of women who are not models) traditionally eschews such angles, this was revolutionary. Or revolutionary-ish: the face of Glossier effectively remained that of founder and now-former CEO Emily Weiss, a slim, conventionally attractive young white woman.
Beauty standards never changed-changed, but they seemed as though maybe they might. The photo made the model look fat, and that was the point. My elder-millennial mind was blown. At last, the script was flipped.
But now, the script went and un-flipped itself. An embrace of conventional attractiveness—the thing ‘we’ as a society had supposedly transcended—is in full force.
Elsesser’s own career somewhat follows the contours of the long 2010s—the era leading up to Oct. 7 and Trump 2.0. In 2021, she broke the plus-size-cover-model barrier for American Vogue. In 2023, she did the same for Fashion Week’s Model of the Year award. In 2025, her career continues to be thriving, but best as I can tell from camera angles and whatnot, she is now a slim woman, or one who would register as such in any context other than a 1998 runway. But it doesn’t fully follow that trajectory, as she is still not a white woman, and whiteness is having a moment. And it is there that our story begins.
***
The problem with ever taking even the teensiest of vacations is that you might miss a news cycle so perfectly suited to your beat that you have no choice but to cover it late. Yes, I’m talking about the actress Sydney Sweeney doing a jeans ad that led to discourse and discourse about the discourse and repeat so many times that if we were talking laundry and a pair of jeans (mall or otherwise), they would remain but the faintest scrap of denim. Clad in a sultry Canadian tuxedo—yes, such things are possible—Sweeney throatily says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”
At first, the story was that progressives thought the ad was dog-whistle white supremacy. Then it became that conservatives (including Donald Trump, JD Vance, and other top-level Republican politicians) had exaggerated the extent to which the ad had triggered the libs. Except the outraged takes were real and perhaps more prominent than they’d been made out to be! I have read both that the ad helped (the company stock) and hurt (foot traffic to shops) the jeans company in question, American Eagle Outfitters, and am not enough of a business journalist—or, it’s too soon—to say which is accurate.
This much was clear: the accusations of Nazism were over-the-top and absurd. As my friend and Feminine Chaos podcast co-host Kat Rosenfield put it, “When American Eagle makes an ad featuring Sweeney being stuffed into the trunk of a car by a swarthy, hook-nosed villain wearing a kippah, give me a call.”
Indeed, a zoomed-out look at what this company is about all but confirms it has nothing to do with Nazism. It did a Pride post on Instagram, and uses models of different races. These are not choices a far-right clothing company would make.
But the clincher is that the company’s CEO, Jay Schottenstein, is not just incidentally Jewish but tremendously so, as per Matthew Kassel’s Jewish Insider story about Schottenstein’s Judaism:
“Outside of philanthropic circles—where he is widely recognized as one of the most consequential sponsors of Jewish causes in the United States and Israel—his relatively private lifestyle has otherwise obscured his long-standing dedication to a range of issues including educational efforts, archeological research and translations of ancient Jewish texts.”
Yes, the name “American Eagle” suggests something patriotic and traditionalist. But—like Roots, a Canadian counterpart—it has a Jewish origin story. One doubts that brothers Jerry and Mark Silverman, the founders of American Eagle Outfitters, had any involvement with white supremacy, on account of, Jerry and Mark Silverman.
Of course, that the purveyors of a product happen to sometimes or often be Jewish doesn’t mean the product itself is guaranteed to raise Jews’ self-esteem. If this were the case, the actresses cast in lead roles in Hollywood over the decades might have looked rather different, with Rachel Weisz less of a rule-proving exception.
Jews’ relationship to white beauty standards is a microcosm of our stance relative to whiteness generally. I think of the notorious 2021 remarks from podcast host Recho Omondi, regarding her guest, the influencer Leandra Medine Cohen, a white-privilege call-out (of a Mizrahi Jew, at that) that itself got called out for antisemitism: “At the end of the day you guys are going to get your nose jobs and your keratin treatments and change your last name from Ralph Lifshitz to Ralph Lauren and you will be fine.”
In 2025, it is that much harder to make the case that Jews “will be fine.” Not while we’re caught between a left more furious at us than ever for our unchosen role as avatars for right-wing whiteness, and a right that’s not averse to advocating for the genes-with-a-g to be blue. I get that years of quasi-pretending there was no such thing as conventional attractiveness were exhausting, but also, I have trouble finding ‘we can declare hot blondes hot again’ a relief. Not that I look like either of these women, but I look more like Sweeney than Elsesser, certainly than Elsesser circa 2017. But I am well aware of which world is better for women like me, as in Jewish ones, and it’s not the one we’re in now.
***
Arguments over whether liberals were offended over nothing, or whether conservatives (and mall-clothing companies) were Nazis now were missing a third possibility: that American Eagle Outfitters knew exactly what it was doing, and created an ad campaign that would get attention on precisely the levels it did. There’s the obvious one (attractive woman being sexy), and then the discourse one.
There is also the fact that Sweeney herself is meant to represent the post-vibe-shift something-or-other, and not just because, as we now know, she’s a registered Republican. There’s a reason Sharon Waxman brings up this ad as an example in her recent New York Times op-ed, “Hollywood Is ‘Hot, Horny and White’ Again.” As Waxman astutely observes, “not so long ago Ms. Sweeney might have had to apologize for her insensitivity and make a donation to the A.C.L.U.”
Still, jeans/genes, this would have been neither here nor there, if it were just about her being hot, a trait for which genetically blessed is a colloquial euphemism. It’s the “blue,” referring ambiguously to jeans and eye colour, that made me go hmm. Not hmm as in, that the people selling jeans to mainstream audiences in 2025 secret Nazis, but rather, a hunch that the ad’s creators maybe kinda-sorta know people would be mad, and courted the controversy to boost brand awareness. I may be thinking too conspiratorially, but I will say that the ad reminded me, a person who has never shopped at that store, that it exists.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. Subscribe to her podcast, The Jewish Angle wherever you get your podcasts.
