US fashion retailer American Eagle Outfitters’ new denim campaign featuring 27-year-old actor Sydney Sweeney is causing uproar around the world.
As part of the campaign, American Eagle is launching ‘the Sydney Jean,’ a limited-run on the company’s wide-legged jeans that were produced in partnership with Sweeney.
The ‘Euphoria’ and ‘White Lotus’ actor features in various photos and videos, including one where she cleans off a poster of herself wearing a denim jacket and jeans with a tagline of a wordplay about denim.
The original phrase says ‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Genes’, while the last word is then crossed and replaced with ‘Jeans’.
The same tagline appears in most ads for the campaign.
‘Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour,’ Sweeney says in one of the ads.
‘My jeans are blue.’
Campaign sparks online backlash
The phrases ‘good genes’ and ‘great genes’ are normally used in the language of eugenicists, who believe that humanity could be improved through selective breeding for traits like thinness, attractiveness and whiteness.
Assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Marcus Collins, said the criticism could have been avoided if the ads showed models of different races making the ‘genes’ pun.
“You can either say this was ignorance, or this was laziness, or say that this is intentional,” Collins said.
“Either one of the three aren’t good.”
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On social media, some users accuse the public of reading too much into the campaign’s message.
‘I love how the leftist meltdown over the Sydney Sweeney ad has only resulted in a beautiful white, blonde girl with blue eyes getting 1000x the exposure for her ‘good genes’’, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly wrote on X.
One comment on the viral post on Instagram read: ‘Maybe I’m too… woke, but getting a blue-eyed, blonde, white woman and focusing your campaign around her having perfect genetics feels weird…’
Another user summed up the stir: ‘It’s not just about the jeans. It’s about who gets to be the face of America’s ‘best genes.’’
Ad campaign boosts American Eagle stock
The campaign couldn’t come at a better time.
American Eagle, like many retailers, is battling with sluggish consumer spending and higher costs from tariffs.
In the February-April quarter, American Eagle reported that total sales were down 5% compared to the previous year.
The day after American Eagle announced its collaboration with Sydney Sweeney, the company’s stocks closed more than 4% up.
In total, the campaign caused the company’s stock to spike by 16%.
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Analysts pointed to meme stock behaviour, a viral surge driven by retail traders on Reddit and Stocktwits, not by fundamentals.
Like AMC or GameStop, American Eagle became a momentary favourite based on online buzz and speculation.
Marketing ads are one of the ways companies can stand out in the present world.
The Sweeney campaign “was a company figuring out how to break through in a world where everyone is screaming and saying, ‘Look at me, look at me!”, co-founder of brand marketing firm Metaforce, Allen Adamson said.
Sweeney’s adverts were compared to Brooke Shields’ ad campaign for Calvin Klein jeans when she was 15.
At the time, the brand was criticised for sexualising the underage Shields, who told Vogue in 2021 that she thought the criticism was ‘ridiculous.’
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Anna Ferraz