“white people don’t have cousin culture. their families are small and uninspired. weird customs. you can see that in kickstarter videos.” —Doreen St. Félix, New Yorker critic

Two weeks ago, shortly after Sydney Sweeney’s “great genes jeans” campaign went live, Doreen St. Félix published a piece in The New Yorker, “The Banal Provocation of Sydney Sweeney’s Jeans,” in which she argued the ad depicted America “as a zombie slop of mustangs, denim, and good genes, its lowest-common-denominator stuff.” The piece contrasts Sweeney with Beyoncé, who also advertised denim recently, in a “Denim Cowboy” campaign for Levi’s. St. Félix argues, essentially, that Beyoncé’s ad is progressive whereas Sweeney’s is regressive.