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\n The great ongoing American conversation escalated into a great American bar fight this summer, as a long and increasingly unhinged national back-and-forth about race, politics, sexuality, the nature of both the Trump administration and fame itself was triggered by \u2026 a jeans ad.\n <\/p>\n
\n What happened? American Eagle released a campaign starring the exceedingly charismatic actress Sydney Sweeney. In one ad, she is seen clad in a revealing version of the Canadian tuxedo, veritably busting out of a not really buttoned jean jacket. But though the mere facts of her physical existence have ignited<\/a> multiple national debates previously, in this case, the reason people are talking (and talking!) is that the ad\u2019s script had her making puns about genes and jeans.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cGenes are passed down from parents to offspring,\u201d she says in one ad. In another cut, in which the camera aggressively zooms in on her cleavage, she claims: \u201cMy body\u2019s composition is determined by my genes.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Some viewers immediately connected the genetics commentary to her brilliant blue eyes and blonde, fine hair. After all, it was just last October<\/a> that Donald Trump was identifying \u201cbad genes\u201d as a cause of invented or real crime committed by immigrants. Many felt that the ad was playing into this dark, not-very-concealed conversation about genetics in America.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis is intentional. This is pointed, and you\u2019re calling out to the consumers that you hope to attract here,\u201d said Cheryl Overton, a long-time brand strategist and communications executive. \u201cIf American Eagle is really out there trying to target Americans to the right or to the far right, so be it. If that\u2019s who the product is designed for now, that is their right as a company to do that. But you have to know that folks are educated, folks are nuanced, and folks are willing to call brands out.\u201d\n <\/p>\n The story of Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad\n <\/p>\n The story of Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad<\/p>\n 2:27 <\/p>\n \n That calling-out was quickly followed by a louder and nastier wave of disdain that people would dare suggest the ad was intentionally about race \u2014 or that everyone was being stupid for talking about jeans anyway. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of conservative finger-wagging, like, \u2018This is just a jeans ad,\u2019 said Emma McClendon, a fashion historian and assistant professor of fashion studies at St. John\u2019s University, who literally teaches a class on denim. \u201cBut I think that that just plays also on stereotypes of fashion being frivolous, and this just being jeans. The reality is that there\u2019s nothing more intimate to our identity than how we outfit our bodies.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n At the beginning of this week, a spokesperson for the White House weighed in, saying that all this ruckus was why Trump got elected, calling<\/a> the criticism \u201ccancel culture run amok.\u201d US Vice President JD Vance finally entered<\/a> the fray at the end of the week, suggesting that the lesson Democrats \u201chave apparently taken is we\u2019re going to attack people as Nazis for thinking Sydney Sweeney is beautiful.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n At last, as the week wound down, American Eagle issued a statement that was bound to make everyone a little unhappy. \u201cGreat jeans look good on everyone,\u201d they assured us. Do they?\n <\/p>\n \n While American Eagle enjoyed a brief $2-a-share surge in its stock price during the controversy, all the rest of us got were a bunch of questions. Here are some answers.\n <\/p>\n \t\tSydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans | American Eagle \n \u201cOur leadership team passed around some articles about it, and we were discussing whether we thought the American Eagle team when it first came out, did they understand? Were they trying to do something edgy and sexy that came across racist and didn\u2019t recognize that?\u201d asked Kimberly Jefferson, senior vice president of client relations at PANBlast, a public relations firm that serves brands in the tech sector. \u201cA quick look at their leadership team: They\u2019re a very white organization. So did they just miss it? Or is this intentionally playing to at best, a conservative, at worst, a racist ideal system that is pervasively growing in America? We went back and forth on that. How intentional was this?\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt seemed clear to me that they were aligning themselves with a white nationalist, MAGA-friendly identity,\u201d said Shalini Shankar, an anthropology professor at Northwestern University who studies youth and advertising. \u201cI think that this is them trying to rebrand themselves for the present moment, and language is very deliberately used here. People don\u2019t invoke genetics casually. It\u2019s just, it\u2019s very, very easy to sell denim without ever referencing it.\u201d\n <\/p>\n @americaneagle<\/a> <\/p>\n Master of tension. And engines. Grab Syd’s jeans before they\u2019re gone.<\/p>\n \u266c original sound – American Eagle<\/a> <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis one is just the consequences of bad and, dare I say, lazy writing. I don\u2019t think it was funny or clever,\u201d said Alyssa Vingan, fashion writer<\/a> and former editor of Nylon and Fashionista. \u201cAnd I do think obviously it\u2019s cheap humor to have somebody like Sydney Sweeney, who\u2019s blonde with large breasts and a small waist, say she has good genes because she\u2019s hot. I don\u2019t think that it was much deeper than that. Unfortunately due to the climate we\u2019re in and things going on in America at large, it does read very, very, very poorly and insensitively.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s something to the fact that this company is called American Eagle, she\u2019s in jeans, with a car, with a dog,\u201d said McClendon, the fashion professor. \u201cIn the current political climate, and then with the invocation of genetics, it feels like it\u2019s just playing on this broader, larger cultural social grappling we\u2019re having right now with what it means to be American.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n They absolutely did mean it, said Emily Keegin<\/a>, a freelance photo director \u2014 and lots of us are just pretending otherwise. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting to see how the news organizations that we consider to be left or more liberal, like the New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine<\/a>, their op-eds about this from yesterday and the day before are downplaying the situation or saying that it\u2019s not a big deal, or that it was just a mistake, or something, like it was overlooked. It means that the institutions are willing to give a pass to these things that maybe they shouldn\u2019t be.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Probably not, but do you even remember all that now<\/a>? \u201cMaybe two weeks ago? It was such a huge thing, and now everyone\u2019s moved past that,\u201d said Hailey Knott, who is a social media manager for a global nonprofit and who worked at American Eagle for two years. \u201cYou know that CEO stepped down because of all of that controversy. And now nobody even \u2014 in my opinion \u2014 cares about that anymore.\u201d\n <\/p>\n Coldplay’s Chris Martin warns concertgoers they could be on camera\n <\/p>\n Coldplay’s Chris Martin warns concertgoers they could be on camera<\/p>\n 0:50 <\/p>\n \n \u201cRarely do you ever see something blow up so quickly as the kiss cam incident,\u201d said Cyndee Harrison, a reputation and branding strategist and crisis communications specialist. \u201cBut their response<\/a>, I thought it was masterfully done. They had humor and they were creative and they just brought everything back into brand alignment. In my opinion, American Eagle had a perfect opportunity to follow that same playbook: Acknowledge, reframe and move forward with clarity.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n They did not.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cDid it achieve the goal of getting people to talk about them and think about them? It did. The jury is still out on whether it\u2019s good for their business, whether it\u2019s going to increase sales, or whether it\u2019s bad for their business,\u201d said Alison Weissbrot, executive editor at Adweek.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI feel like this is a masterclass in attention economy,\u201d said Sam Gauchier, a vice president at Michele Marie PR. \u201cI feel like American Eagle is riding the wave of controversy on purpose, just knowing that the outrage has become a form of its own currency \u2014 because everything at the end of the day is about how much money we can make as a brand, the amount of sales, the amount of clicks on an article, all of those things.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cAdvertising is having a really hard time for a reason. You know, people are getting laid off for a reason, and it\u2019s not just AI. It\u2019s incredibly hard to make a dent in our media landscape,\u201d said Keegin, the photo director.\n <\/p>\n @americaneagle<\/a> <\/p>\n Posters up. Secrets out: Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. Get them at the \ud83d\udd17<\/p>\n \u266c Best One Yet – Layup<\/a> <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis is the modern formula for outrage marketing,\u201d said Molly McPherson, crisis and reputation strategist. \u201cYou spark debate, you drive engagement, you ride the wave. And then when the dust settles, American Eagle gets the clicks, the coverage and also the crash.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis wasn\u2019t a mistake per se as much as a kind of provocation that I think landed as it was intended to and that we should expect to probably see more of this type of messaging, given how \u2014 in many ways \u2014 successful this one was,\u201d Shankar said.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI\u2019m honestly not a believer in all press is good press,\u201d said Knott, the former American Eagle employee. She means because someone always has to clean up the consequences. \u201cThis is a PR crisis for them, and it\u2019s coming at them from social media. The senior leadership team, they don\u2019t have to see that. The social media team does. So they\u2019re the ones taking the brunt of that.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Until Friday\u2019s company statement, the company\u2019s top post on Instagram, for around five days, was of a Black woman in American Eagle clothing. Some of the comments were \u201ckeep it white \u2764\ufe0f \u2764\ufe0f\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8\u201d and \u201cLove me some lib tears\u201d and a lot of people saying \u201cdamage control.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI think it\u2019s extremely telling that American Eagle hasn\u2019t posted on social media since Sunday or said anything, because in my experience, when I worked there, they\u2019re posting at least three times a day on social media platforms,\u201d said Knott, of the week before Friday evening\u2019s statement. \u201cSo if they\u2019re scaling back to zero times a day, it\u2019s a problem.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Not posting was probably wise. \u201cI think if this had been a client of mine, I feel like the first thing I would say is don\u2019t rush \u2014 take a beat, read the room, get curious about what people are upset about,\u201d said Gauchier. She also found it telling. The brand silence \u201calso helps me think that this is calculated,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI think we\u2019re all so sick of these brand apologies that feel very AI-written or written by the law firm, and don\u2019t really have any heart or soul. I think what people want to hear is: How\u2019d you get here? Do you hear why folks are concerned? What will you do moving forward to make sure that your storytelling is welcoming to all? But if this is a strategy to give the middle fingers up to those of us who are quote, unquote, woke, message received. Mission accomplished,\u201d said Overton.\n <\/p>\n But what if they were just trying to do something sexy and daring and messed up along the way?<\/p>\n \n \u201cThey are immediately very clearly pulling directly from the visual vocabulary of the Brooke Shields ad,\u201d said McClendon, referencing the controversial 1980 Calvin Klein ad<\/a> campaign. But \u201cthe Brooke Shields ads were really purely about sex. The whole genes\/jeans thing \u2013\u2013 that\u2019s new,\u201d she said. (Interestingly, Shields herself said she did not<\/a> see her Calvin Klein ads as overly sexualized.)\n <\/p>\n Reputation strategist on why Sydney Sweeney\u2019s jeans ad sparked controversy\n <\/p>\n Reputation strategist on why Sydney Sweeney\u2019s jeans ad sparked controversy<\/p>\n 5:27 <\/p>\n \n \u201cYou can absolutely celebrate someone\u2019s body, and I mean, she is a beautiful specimen of humanity. But you can still celebrate that while being mindful of the narrative that you\u2019re shaping,\u201d said Harrison. \u201cThis isn\u2019t necessarily \u2018woke messaging,\u2019 it\u2019s just modern mindfulness around concepts like identity and beauty and belonging.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Highly sexualized ads are on brand for the moment, said Adweek\u2019s Weissbrot. \u201cWe\u2019re kind of seeing a return of male gazey advertising,\u201d she said. \u201cSo I do think that, as the country kind of grapples with this rightward shift, advertisers are trying to figure out: What is the mood of the country? Do we appeal to what is the current zeitgeist, for better or worse? Or are we still going to try to meet different groups where they are?\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n American Eagle might, however, have scared other brands off sexy campaigns, or at least might have put a fork in this campaigns \u201990s-basement slightly porny aesthetic. \u201cIf I was Gap and I had a campaign coming out and someone was like, \u2018Wow, that looks just like the Sydney Sweeney campaign,\u2019 I\u2019d be like, \u2018Okay, no, like, we gotta redo this. We gotta, like, rethink this,\u2019\u201d said Keegin.\n <\/p>\n Can America handle it if we have to go through this again?<\/p>\n \n Surprise, we already are. Dunkin\u2019 posted an ad this week with a sexy youthful star<\/a> saying \u201cThis tan? Genetics.\u201d (Among many linking that campaign to the American Eagle campaign was a Dunkin\u2019 account Instagram commenter, who wrote: \u201cI\u2019ll be walking into Dunkin\u2019 sporting my AE jeans.\u201d)\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWhenever I\u2019m working with clients and they have a new campaign coming, I always ask them, like, \u2018Okay, what is the goal of your campaign? Do you want more visibility? Do you want more sales? Do you want more conversion? Like, what is it exactly?\u2019 And if visibility is what they\u2019re looking for, then, you know, obviously I wouldn\u2019t gear them towards this specific strategy. But I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if other brands say visibility is what we\u2019re looking for, and someone might have the idea of doing something that blurs the line,\u201d said Gauchier.\n <\/p>\n \n Experts agree that Sydney Sweeney is always winning. She emerges from this national dust-up only more powerful than ever.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cCertainly, it makes me very uncomfortable to think that Sydney Sweeney, this particular human being, should be targeted,\u201d said Sayantani DasGupta, a senior lecturer in narrative medicine at Columbia University who went to TikTok<\/a> to talk about the ads. \u201cIt\u2019s not about blaming or pointing fingers. It\u2019s about saying, we all live in this society. We all are both creating and perceiving these images, and we\u2019re all ultimately going to be impacted by them.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cShe is a massive movie star who is very smart about who she positions herself next to, the business decisions she makes, and also she is not really a public-facing figure in any way. She remains enigmatic in a way that if she was more personally online, if she expressed her feelings more, then I think she could easily get herself into trouble with stuff like this. But she\u2019s not,\u201d said Sam Bodrojan, a freelance film critic. \u201cShe is able to create conversation around her and create controversy around her, while also fundamentally never being a subject of ire directly. She is a subject of jealousy or envy or a broader symbol of something else \u2014 but nobody is ever really asserting that she is a bad person, and if they are, it just makes her more marketable.\u201d\n <\/p>\n American Eagle \u2018Great Jeans\u2019 ad sparks online debate\n <\/p>\n American Eagle \u2018Great Jeans\u2019 ad sparks online debate<\/p>\n 2:29 <\/p>\n \n These ads are a throwback to advertising that is proven to work because of reasons we might not like. Much of this type of advertising went out of fashion, but the success of this campaign means we might see more again.\n <\/p>\n \n Rachel Rodgers, an associate professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University, did a study<\/a> on the ads for American Eagle\u2019s flagship brand, Aerie, and how those ads impacted body image in 2019. The answer was: It made them feel good about themselves! They liked the \u201cbest friend vibe\u201d and seeing women whose diverse bodies looked like their own. Her belief was that the new ads featuring Sweeney would succeed \u2014 by making women feel bad and ugly. \u201cWe know that typically, idealized and sexualized media images are detrimental to body image and to mood,\u201d she said. \u201cThey typically make people feel worse about themselves and are designed to do so, because that\u2019s one of the things that drives consumption.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n For the campaign, the brand also made a limited run of jeans for Sweeney for which the proceeds would go to benefit the Crisis Text Line<\/a>. \u201cThe thing that has been lost, for me, is that this whole initiative is to benefit domestic violence and a domestic violence charity,\u201d said Overton. \u201cThat is something that has really been lost in the sauce with all of the accolades and criticism. If that was the talent\u2019s intention, if that was the brand\u2019s intention, they\u2019re failing on that.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n No. We are done. May we suggest next learning about the demise of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting<\/a> or the sport of wife-carrying<\/a>?\n <\/p>\n ![\"People](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/ap25213763186054.jpg\")
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