NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AUGUST 01: A window display of actress Sydney Sweeney is seen on a window of an American Eagle store on August 01, 2025 in New York City. American Eagle’s recent denim ad campaign featuring Sweeney has drawn backlash for language and imagery that critics say echoes eugenics-era rhetoric, following a tagline referencing “great genes” alongside visuals of Sweeney in blue jeans. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
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This summer, everybody is talking about jeans, specifically American Eagle jeans. Its “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign, featuring the Euphoria and The White Lotus star that broke on July 23, has sparked outrage from many by playing off the sound-alike words “genes” and “jeans” and garnered raves from others who delight in their outrage.
At the outset, American Eagle bet big on its tie-up with Sweeney. CEO Craig Brommers told Marketing Dive it represents the brand’s largest advertising investment ever and that he expected it to pay off during the back-to-school season, which he described as the “Super Bowl” for jeans sales.
The fact that the ad campaign has gone viral means that American Eagle Outfitters stands to reap exponentially greater returns than it originally invested and over a longer period of time than just the BTS season. It needs the boost after first quarter revenues were down 5% to $1.1 billion, and it ended last year with only 1% growth to $5.3 billion.
Jennifer Foyle, president and executive creative director of AEO’s American Eagle and Aerie brands, said in a statement that American Eagle sets the trend in denim “that leads, never follows.” In trendsetter fashion, American Eagle is going against the current cultural norms by returning to advertising designed to sell, rather than promote a targeted agenda.
Backlash
Sweeney, who is a buxom, blue-eyed blonde, faced backlash from a video where she said, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color…My jeans are blue.”
According to reports, that video was removed from American Eagle’s social channels.
But the damage was done and the online firestorm continues with other ads featuring the tagline’s pun, “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” Cries erupted of Sweeney and American Eagle promoting Nazi-era “Aryan race” eugenics with its implied message of white beauty’s superiority. CNN called it a “white-supremist dog whistle.”
Columbia University’s Dr. Sayantani DasGupta took to TikTok saying, “It is both a testament to this political moment, and its contributing to and reinforcing this kind of anti-immigrant, anti-people of color, pro-eugenic political moment.” That post has garnered over three million views.
There was pushback against the campaign’s overtly sexual tone – harking back to the controversial Cindy Crawford’s white-tank-top and short-shorts Pepsi commercial that ran in the 1992 Super Bowl and the campaign Brooke Shields did with Calvin Klein in the 1980s. The latter was deserved, as Shields was an underage 15 years old at the time, but Sweeney is a 27-year-old adult woman.
Right-Wing Political Figures Push Back Against The Backlash
People on the other side of the cultural divide find the ad clever, even getting a kick from the outrage spawned by the campaign. Conservative bloggers, like Megyn Kelly and Benny Johnson, are making the most of the controversy, and right-leaning Fox News mentioned Sweeney and American Eagle 62 times in the week after it launched, according to Media Matters.
To put the other side’s noses further out of joint, MAGA voices have weighed in, including Sen. Ted Cruz, Vice President J.D. Vance and President Trump.
“Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are ‘flying off the shelves,’” the President said on Truth Social, adding, “The tide has seriously turned — Being WOKE is for losers.”
While Modern Retail reports that American Eagle may be working with a crisis PR firm to counter the backlash, and it did an Instagram post featuring a woman of color stating, “AE Has Great Jeans,” the company remains unapologetic, saying in a statement posted on Instagram:
“‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.”
Cultural Reckoning Or Cultural Shift?
The Collage Group research firm, specializing in cultural intelligence insights, reports that even before the campaign broke, American Eagle had been a laggard in aligning with America’s increasingly diverse consumer base.
“The backlash against American Eagle’s recent campaign isn’t surprising when you look at the brand’s cultural fluency,” said Jack Mackinnon, Collage’s director of cultural insights, citing lower than average scores on several of the six dimensions that make up its Brand Cultural Fluency Quotient.
“When a brand is already underperforming in cultural relevance, missteps in advertising are amplified, because there’s less brand equity to fall back on. Our data shows that culturally fluent brands win in the marketplace,” he continued.
Yet when brands read the cultural signals wrong or push too hard to promote what they perceive as a culturally-progressive agenda, they may pay a heavy price. Think of Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney, Target’s Pride Month 2023 campaign with its tuck-friendly swimsuit or Jaguar’s confusing rebrand without a car in sight.
Master marketer Jennifer Sey, named twice to the Forbes Most Influential CMOs list and who is an expert in many respects on the world of jean advertising from her 23 years with Levi’s, applauds it for returning to marketing fundamentals and “normie” advertising with the only goal to sell more jeans.
“It’s a major about-face after more than a decade of jean, car and beer brands forcing ‘wokeness’ down our gullets,” she wrote on Substack. “But at the end of the day, sex sells and pretty girls with sexy stares can sell anything. After years of hocking body positivity, it appears hot-girl summer is the way to go.”
On a side note, Sey is the founder of XX-XY Athletics, whose mission is to protect women’s and girl’s sports from the inclusion of transgender athletes, a position with which 80% of Americans agree, though no other athletic brand has publicly taken a position on the controversial issue.
The Majority Sides With American Eagle
At least half of the country gets the American Eagle message, according to a YouGov poll fielded Aug. 1 among 3,500 adults. Overall, 52% believe the wordplay in the tagline “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” is appropriate, while only 16% think it inappropriate and 32% are undecided.
Interestingly, the youngest consumers, aged 18 to 29 years old (mostly GenZers and trailing edge Millennials) have the highest share of inappropriates (28%) and lowest share of appropriates (36%).
However, they also have the highest share of uncertains (36%), which isn’t too surprising. Being younger, they are still in the formative stages of building their identity and so more influenced by peer pressure and those they look to as leaders and authority figures.
On the other hand, nearly 60% of adults aged 45 and older believe the wordplay is appropriate. And across the political spectrum, even a plurality of Democrats (46%) and Independents (49%) consider it appropriate.
Ultimate Goal To Sell More Jeans
While the YouGov poll found the youngest cohort is still on the fence about the “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” ad campaign, Sourcing Journal reported late last year that American Eagle brand was the number one jeans line among its core target customers aged 15 to 25 years. Once the dust settles, the young undecideds are likely to join the majority or not let their uncertainty about the appropriateness of the wordplay put them off their favorite jeans.
The campaign has done something that only great advertisements do: broken through the noise and gotten consumers’ attention. And as fellow Forbes.com contributor Doug Melville points out, that is increasingly hard to do.
Despite the backlash or even because of it, American Eagle is profiting big-time from the controversy. Its stock is up over 20% since the campaign broke and “The Sydney Jean” she modeled in the ad has sold out.
American Eagle Outfitters will report second-quarter earnings toward the end of August, which will only catch a few days of sales after the campaign broke. At that time, it will be up against high comps of $1.3 billion in sales on 8% growth across its American Eagle and Aerie brands, so it won’t be until the third and fourth quarters when the first results come in.
New Era Dawning
“This was a very strategic effort to do something that pushed the limits, attracted attention and got people to notice the brand,” Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told the Wall Street Journal.
“It’s quite clear that we’re in a new era for advertising. Brands over the past decade have become very careful about being inclusive in their advertising, and I think now clearly that’s changing,” he continued.
By boldly challenging perceived contemporary cultural norms, American Eagle is positioned at the forefront of a cultural realignment that is veering away from extremes and returning to the middle.
“After years of brand-destroying body positivity and ‘inclusive’ marketing, ‘normies’ took the wheel at American Eagle and their sales and stock price soared. The brand is back and relying on the formula as old as advertising itself: hotness,” Sey wrote.
“Brands can further normal ideas to normal people and not feel bad about it anymore. I suspect brands that have been chasing social justice through advertising, which only served to tank sales, are relieved as well,” she concluded.
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