American Eagle stock JUMPS amid woke backlash over new Sydney Sweeney jeans commercial
Last week, the company rolled out its fall commercial lineup featuring the 27-year-old actress in various poses and scenarios with the tagline, 'Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans'.
The obvious reference to her 'genes' didn't sit well with many people on social media, who accused the ads of being a racial dog whistle.
Despite the loud backlash, the double-entendre has seemingly resonated, with American Eagle stock up more than 11 percent since last Wednesday, with a notable spike the day the commercials were released.
Sweeney, who rose to fame starring in HBO 's ' Euphoria ' and 'The White Lotus,' has not publicly addressed the criticism the ads have received.
In one of the most harshly denounced videos, she is seen buttoning up her jeans as she muses: 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color... my genes are blue.'
A second ad saw the camera pan down Sweeney's chest as she models a plunging denim jumpsuit.
'My body's composition is determined by my genes...' she said before scolding the camera: 'Hey, eyes up here.'
The adverts have divided fans, with one critic calling the clip 'one of the loudest and most obvious racialized dog whistles we've seen and heard in a while.'
The phrase 'great genes' is 'historically used to celebrate whiteness, thinness and attractiveness,' which it said made 'this campaign seem to be a tone-deaf marketing move,' a Salon report on the backlash read.
Taking to social media, many expressed their shock at messaging - which they aligned to Nazi propaganda.
Outraged fans penned: 'So Sydney (& American Eagle) somehow expect audiences to not interpret this visual as a euphemism for eugenics and white supremacy?'
'The Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad campaign is just modern day Nazi propaganda. Like it's wild how blatant it is. Things are weird right now, man.'
But American Eagle Chief Marketing Officer Craig Brommers has a decidedly different explanation for what the company was trying to accomplish with the ads featuring Sweeney.
According to Brommers, Sweeney is one of the most recognizable young people in the world.
He said he and others thought putting her face in ads right before the back-to-school season would be a winning strategy.
'To be able to partner with [Sweeney] on this is saying something, and it's saying something in what has been a trickier retail environment this year, that American Eagle is still placing big bets,' he told Marketing Dive. 'We are still the jeans authority, especially for Gen Z.'
Brommers stressed that he wanted American Eagle's brand to be more flashy than that of the main competition, which he named as Shein, Amazon and Walmart.
The company's identity overhaul comes after its total net revenue decreased to $1.1 billion in the first quarter, a five percent year over year decline.
News of this revenue hit was announced on May 29, when shares were trading for around $11.18.
Throughout most of the summer, shares have been high $9 to mid $10 range.
But after the Sweeney ads, American Eagle stock has fully recovered and has even gained.
'What we've also learned along the way is as talent costs have escalated, sometimes it's actually more important to place the big bets behind the biggest stars, and while those investments tend to be higher, the payback tends to be higher as well,' Brommers said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New Statesman
2 hours ago
- New Statesman
How Pamela Anderson broke modern feminism
Pamela Anderson has committed a grave and detrimental error, inimical to the women's rights movement: she dared to wear a 1960s‑style dress and no make-up to her film premiere. Harmless, you might think – perhaps even utterly trivial. But according to some of the feminist commentariat online, this was a 'rancid 1960s Audrey Hepburn 'now I'm classy, see!?' cosplay' which was 'extremely tradwife conservative‑coded'. Lost? Baffled? Wondering why a lack of make-up is suddenly a feminist transgression? Welcome to the world of fourth‑, fifth‑ and 500th‑wave feminism, where the last dregs of a once‑powerful movement slug it out on X and Bluesky over the clothing, cosmetics and career choices of female celebrities. If it's not the too-conservative Pamela, it's the hyper‑sexualised Sabrina Carpenter or the Republican Sydney Sweeney, whose 'great genes' joke in an advert for American Eagle has drawn accusations over an apparent endorsement of eugenics as well as the denim brand. And that's before we even get to the interminable debates over whether Taylor Swift is a paragon of female creativity or a mercenary capitalist. In the West, feminism was once animated by shared objectives such as suffrage, reproductive autonomy and resistance to sexual harassment. Now, it has degenerated into a daily skirmish to produce the most ostentatiously progressive squawk in an X thread, with little to no discernible purpose that ties the movement together. Western feminism has, in many respects, lost its way. The shift from communal, public debate to an almost exclusively online form of activism has driven feminists down sharply divergent paths. Where feminists once happily identified simply as such, the online world has fractured the movement into categories such as intersectional feminists, tradfems, radfems, ecofeminists and postmodern feminists. These factions burrow into their own convictions and subcultures, bringing them a sense of identity and shared goals. But in the process, many of feminism's founding principles have been diluted, and former comrades find themselves battling one another. All the while, the patriarchy rearms. It could be argued that this is because many of the early aims of the feminist movement have been achieved. This is true for some: the largely white, middle‑class, university-educated feminists who might enjoy more equal opportunities today. But herein lies the problem with many of the feminists active during the second (1960s-1980s) and third wave (1990s-2010s). When the issues ceased to affect them directly, the cause seemed to become less urgent. And so we are left where we are today: battling it out online over the merits of Anderson's clothes or Sweeney's jeans (and genes). Out in the real world, meanwhile, there is much for feminists to campaign against. In Sudan, women are bearing the brunt of a calamitous war no one seems to care about. In Afghanistan, girls remain banned from pursuing education beyond the age of 12. And in Gaza, starving women are being beaten and killed every day. Whether Carpenter's album cover is ironic or moronic is a question of stupefying luxury. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe If such causes seem distant, there is no shortage of battles to wage at home. The Femicide Census reports that, since 2009, a woman in the UK has been killed by a man every three days. Data indicates that Northern Ireland is the most perilous place in Europe to be a woman, with a femicide rate three times higher than that of England or Wales. In domestic abuse refuges, 61 per cent of all referrals are refused – often due to inadequate space or capacity. Black women are 2.8 times more likely than white women to die in the first six weeks after they have given birth. This is all happening right now in the UK. But none of that is as effortless – or as gloriously low‑stakes – as performative squabbling on X. For the feminist movement to extricate itself from this impasse, activists must care less about A-listers and more about the millions of ordinary women with no fame, money or power. There is something depressing about the fact that two of the most prominent feminist debates of the past decade – #MeToo and Time's Up – began as campaigns centred on safeguarding celebrities in the workplace. Less than a decade after #MeToo, we find ourselves in a world where figures like Bonnie Blue recruit gangs of 'barely legal' teenage girls for gang-bangs for profit; the internet is saturated with pornography that encourages men to choke women; and serial abusers such as Dominique Pelicot record their violent sexual assaults. While the #MeToo movement was noble, it now feels – at least to me, a 25-year-old feminist in London – like a battle from a more privileged and somewhat naive era. Social media activism serves a purpose – it is vital to monitor the insidious creep of regressive values back into Western society. But fixating on Pamela Anderson, Sydney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter does nothing to slow it. On the contrary, it often reinforces the right-wing perception that online liberals have drifted far beyond the realm of the relatable. Hope still glimmers. Women such as Gisèle Pelicot, Bisan Owda, Angela Davis, Yulia Navalnaya and Narges Mohammadi continue to lend the movement credibility and honour. Feminists are capable of caring about the plight of Gazan women while also scrutinising the role models presented to young Western girls. Yet all we seem capable of producing now is more division, more argument, and more time squandered on X. Meanwhile – far from our furious typing – the patriarchy looks on happily. [See also: The Online Safety Act humiliates us all] Related
Daily Mail
5 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Lizzo takes aim at Sydney Sweeney in new song lyrics amid American Eagle 'good jeans' campaign backlash
Lizzo donned Daisy Dukes and name-dropped Sydney Sweeney in the lyrics of her new song, I'm Goin In Till October, which she teased on Wednesday. It marked the 37-year-old rapper-singer-flautist's third parody in a week mocking the 27-year-old Euphoria stunner's controversial American Eagle campaign, which was accused of pushing Nazi-like eugenics as aspirational. 'No kizzy / He ain't got no business being with me,' Lizzo - who boasts 44.6M social media followers - rapped. 'Fat a** pretty face with the ti**ies / Bi***, I got good jeans like I'm Sydney!' The four-time Grammy winner - who rocked a waist-length platinum-blonde wig - twerked up a storm while pretending to wash a retro red car in the raunchy clip similar to Sydney's own 2020 Ford Shelby GT350. Last month, Lizzo - who gets 12.1M monthly listeners on Spotify - revealed she was 'back in the studio' so the new track will most likely appear on her upcoming fifth studio album, Love in Real Life. On Monday, the Crashout rapper posted a different American Eagle rap parody, which began with Fox commentator saying: 'We are over this woke agenda, we are over the Lizzos, we are over the Dylan Mulvaneys. If this was a 300-pound, non-binary person they would be applauding her.' Lizzo (born Melissa Jefferson) first lampooned the $3.3B denim brand last Thursday by reposting a political meme featuring an AI version of herself in a Texas tuxedo captioned: 'My jeans are black…' 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,' Sweeney said in the original commercial. 'My jeans are blue.' The newly-registered Republican has yet to publicly address the 'White supremacy' backlash, but CEO Jay Schottenstein issued a statement last Friday stressing that the spot 'is and always was about the jeans' and noted that 'great jeans look good on everyone.' But everything changed for American Eagle on Sunday when President Donald Trump publicly gushed about Sydney's political leanings and told White House reporters that 'her ad is fantastic.' On Monday, the 79-year-old politician doubled down on his social media platform Truth Social, gushing: 'Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there. It's for American Eagle, and the jeans are "flying off the shelves." Go get 'em Sydney!' The Pittsburgh-based fashion retailer's stock price, which had dropped dramatically last week, surged over 13% specifically thanks to the Trump bump. The four-time Grammy winner - who rocked a waist-length platinum-blonde wig - twerked up a storm while pretending to wash a retro red car in the raunchy clip similar to Sydney's own 2020 Ford Shelby GT350 The newly-registered Republican has yet to publicly address the 'White supremacy' backlash, but CEO Jay Schottenstein issued a statement last Friday stressing that the spot 'is and always was about the jeans' and noted that 'great jeans look good on everyone' On Monday, the 79-year-old politician doubled down on his social media platform Truth Social, gushing: 'Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there. It's for American Eagle, and the jeans are "flying off the shelves." Go get 'em Sydney!' American Eagle pledged to donate 100% of the proceeds from 'The Sydney Jean' (featuring a butterfly patch representing domestic violence awareness) to mental health support non-profit, Crisis Text Line. Ironically, Lizzo told PAPER last week: 'I love my natural face. I look at my mother's face and I'm like hell yeah. I feel very blessed to have great genes and I wanna show it. Why cover up what God gave you?' On January 16, the Yitty co-creator announced that she had reached her weight-loss goal, lowered her body mass index (BMI) by 10.5, and lost 16% of her body fat since 2023. Lizzo - whose Halloween costume was Ozempic - repeatedly denied being on the trendy GLP-1 drug until June 19 when she confessed on the Just Trish podcast that she had tried it in the past. The Still Bad singer will next produce and star in a biopic about pioneering electric guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, which will mark her biggest acting gig yet. Lizzo will eventually have to face her former back-up dancers - Arianna Davis, Crystal Williams, and Noelle Rodriguez - at a jury trial in Santa Monica Courthouse due to their sexual, religious, and racial harassment lawsuit.
Edinburgh Reporter
5 hours ago
- Edinburgh Reporter
Fringe 2025 – Niusia ⭐⭐⭐⭐
'My nana was an iridescent entertainer. And I remember her as a bitch… She was a very savvy businesswoman and she played hardball… she was totally erratic, so you never knew if she was going to be kind or enraged. When I was growing up, I didn't get the vivacious [version]. I got the bitter and cruel and angry one.' It's a startlingly frank and vivid opening by Beth Paterson, whose multi-layered one-woman play, written in collaboration with Kat Yates, the director, melds together memories, storytelling and verbatim accounts of Niusia Rubinlicht, who was deported from the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War to Auschwitz. At the concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland she was a forced assistant to Josef Mengele. Niusia, who came from a well-educated, wealthy Jewish family, was a nurse and had been studying to be a doctor via a correspondence course in Italy, being unable to do so as a woman and a Jew in Poland. At Auschwitz, she was an obvious forced candidate to help the Nazi doctor, known as 'the angel of death', conduct inhumane medical experiments on prisoners, mainly twin children, in pseudo-scientific racial studies. Paterson, 30, from Melbourne, gives a powerful performance, gyrating between her 'loud and prickly' nana – played with a somewhat hammy Polish-Jewish accent – various iterations of herself, and her mum, Susie, a psychologist and author, who features via a voiceover recalling as a six-year-old her 'very tender' mother: 'Give her an audience and she was absolutely, coruscatingly brilliant.' In an intense hour, there are graphic descriptions of Niusia smuggling out medication 'in her cavities' for fellow inmates and of the forced humiliation in which prisoners soiled themselves; then of her returning after the war to Poland where an antisemitic neighbour came at her with a knife. Equally, there's gallows humour, with Paterson slapping her bum at one point and noting how 'arse-shvitz' (yiddish for 'sweating arse') sounds like 'Auschwitz' and jazz music to accompany a party thrown by her grandmother during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, with Paterson picturing people queueing for the doughnuts she was making in the kitchen of her family home in the suburb of Elwood. The set flits between one of her grandmother's handful of Melbourne dress shops in the 1960s, her living room, a boarding house she ran and the nursing home where Paterson sings 'My Funny Valentine' and 'Blue Moon', addressing her as 'Moja kochana babcia [My darling grandmother]'. There's also what Paterson calls 'a liminal memory space' and as the action darts around it examines the effect on her of 'an awful lot of secrets and no-go zones' in her mother's childhood. 'Openness is our ethic,' she says. Probably the only Jew at an Anglican school, she didn't have a batmitzvah and calls herself 'Jew…ish'. During the heated action, books, including one on psychology, are angrily thrown out of cardboard boxes and gently put back in, while an empty armchair with a shawl draped over the back eloquently conjures up its multilingual missing occupant, who died, aged 86, in 2008. Niusia and her husband, Leon, we were told earlier, had met at a postwar displaced persons' camp and she gave birth, while still suffering from malnutrition two years after the war ended, to identical twin girls. 'Isn't that the best 'f*ck-you',' says Paterson. Summerhall, former women's locker room (Until Aug 25) Like this: Like Related
