We asked experts to explain the Sydney Sweeney jeans drama

CNN

4 days ago

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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 … a jeans ad.
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 multiple national debates previously, in this case, the reason people are talking (and talking!) is that the ad's script had her making puns about genes and jeans.
'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring,' she says in one ad. In another cut, in which the camera aggressively zooms in on her cleavage, she claims: 'My body's composition is determined by my genes.'
Some viewers immediately connected the genetics commentary to her brilliant blue eyes and blonde, fine hair. After all, it was just last October that Donald Trump was identifying 'bad genes' 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.
'This is intentional. This is pointed, and you're calling out to the consumers that you hope to attract here,' said Cheryl Overton, a long-time brand strategist and communications executive. 'If American Eagle is really out there trying to target Americans to the right or to the far right, so be it. If that's 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.'
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 — or that everyone was being stupid for talking about jeans anyway. 'There's been a lot of conservative finger-wagging, like, 'This is just a jeans ad,' said Emma McClendon, a fashion historian and assistant professor of fashion studies at St. John's University, who literally teaches a class on denim. 'But I think that that just plays also on stereotypes of fashion being frivolous, and this just being jeans. The reality is that there's nothing more intimate to our identity than how we outfit our bodies.'
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 the criticism 'cancel culture run amok.' US Vice President JD Vance finally entered the fray at the end of the week, suggesting that the lesson Democrats 'have apparently taken is we're going to attack people as Nazis for thinking Sydney Sweeney is beautiful.'
At last, as the week wound down, American Eagle issued a statement that was bound to make everyone a little unhappy. 'Great jeans look good on everyone,' they assured us. Do they?
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.
'Our 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't recognize that?' asked Kimberly Jefferson, senior vice president of client relations at PANBlast, a public relations firm that serves brands in the tech sector. 'A quick look at their leadership team: They're 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?'
'It seemed clear to me that they were aligning themselves with a white nationalist, MAGA-friendly identity,' said Shalini Shankar, an anthropology professor at Northwestern University who studies youth and advertising. 'I think that this is them trying to rebrand themselves for the present moment, and language is very deliberately used here. People don't invoke genetics casually. It's just, it's very, very easy to sell denim without ever referencing it.'
Master of tension. And engines. Grab Syd's jeans before they're gone. 'This one is just the consequences of bad and, dare I say, lazy writing. I don't think it was funny or clever,' said Alyssa Vingan, fashion writer and former editor of Nylon and Fashionista. 'And I do think obviously it's cheap humor to have somebody like Sydney Sweeney, who's blonde with large breasts and a small waist, say she has good genes because she's hot. I don't think that it was much deeper than that. Unfortunately due to the climate we're in and things going on in America at large, it does read very, very, very poorly and insensitively.'
'There's something to the fact that this company is called American Eagle, she's in jeans, with a car, with a dog,' said McClendon, the fashion professor. 'In the current political climate, and then with the invocation of genetics, it feels like it's just playing on this broader, larger cultural social grappling we're having right now with what it means to be American.'
They absolutely did mean it, said Emily Keegin, a freelance photo director — and lots of us are just pretending otherwise. 'It's 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, their op-eds about this from yesterday and the day before are downplaying the situation or saying that it's 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't be.'
Probably not, but do you even remember all that now? 'Maybe two weeks ago? It was such a huge thing, and now everyone's moved past that,' said Hailey Knott, who is a social media manager for a global nonprofit and who worked at American Eagle for two years. 'You know that CEO stepped down because of all of that controversy. And now nobody even — in my opinion — cares about that anymore.'
'Rarely do you ever see something blow up so quickly as the kiss cam incident,' said Cyndee Harrison, a reputation and branding strategist and crisis communications specialist. 'But their response, 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.'
They did not.
'Did 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's good for their business, whether it's going to increase sales, or whether it's bad for their business,' said Alison Weissbrot, executive editor at Adweek.
'I feel like this is a masterclass in attention economy,' said Sam Gauchier, a vice president at Michele Marie PR. 'I 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 — 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.'
'Advertising is having a really hard time for a reason. You know, people are getting laid off for a reason, and it's not just AI. It's incredibly hard to make a dent in our media landscape,' said Keegin, the photo director.
Posters up. Secrets out: Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. Get them at the 🔗 'This is the modern formula for outrage marketing,' said Molly McPherson, crisis and reputation strategist. 'You 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.'
'This wasn't 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 — in many ways — successful this one was,' Shankar said.
'I'm honestly not a believer in all press is good press,' said Knott, the former American Eagle employee. She means because someone always has to clean up the consequences. 'This is a PR crisis for them, and it's coming at them from social media. The senior leadership team, they don't have to see that. The social media team does. So they're the ones taking the brunt of that.'
Until Friday's company statement, the company's top post on Instagram, for around five days, was of a Black woman in American Eagle clothing. Some of the comments were 'keep it white ❤️ ❤️🇺🇸' and 'Love me some lib tears' and a lot of people saying 'damage control.'
'I think it's extremely telling that American Eagle hasn't posted on social media since Sunday or said anything, because in my experience, when I worked there, they're posting at least three times a day on social media platforms,' said Knott, of the week before Friday evening's statement. 'So if they're scaling back to zero times a day, it's a problem.'
A post shared by American Eagle (@americaneagle) Not posting was probably wise. 'I think if this had been a client of mine, I feel like the first thing I would say is don't rush — take a beat, read the room, get curious about what people are upset about,' said Gauchier. She also found it telling. The brand silence 'also helps me think that this is calculated,' she said.
'I think we're all so sick of these brand apologies that feel very AI-written or written by the law firm, and don't really have any heart or soul. I think what people want to hear is: How'd 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,' said Overton.
'They are immediately very clearly pulling directly from the visual vocabulary of the Brooke Shields ad,' said McClendon, referencing the controversial 1980 Calvin Klein ad campaign. But 'the Brooke Shields ads were really purely about sex. The whole genes/jeans thing –– that's new,' she said. (Interestingly, Shields herself said she did not see her Calvin Klein ads as overly sexualized.)
'You can absolutely celebrate someone's 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're shaping,' said Harrison. 'This isn't necessarily 'woke messaging,' it's just modern mindfulness around concepts like identity and beauty and belonging.'
Highly sexualized ads are on brand for the moment, said Adweek's Weissbrot. 'We're kind of seeing a return of male gazey advertising,' she said. 'So 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?'
American Eagle might, however, have scared other brands off sexy campaigns, or at least might have put a fork in this campaigns '90s-basement slightly porny aesthetic. 'If I was Gap and I had a campaign coming out and someone was like, 'Wow, that looks just like the Sydney Sweeney campaign,' I'd be like, 'Okay, no, like, we gotta redo this. We gotta, like, rethink this,'' said Keegin.
Surprise, we already are. Dunkin' posted an ad this week with a sexy youthful star saying 'This tan? Genetics.' (Among many linking that campaign to the American Eagle campaign was a Dunkin' account Instagram commenter, who wrote: 'I'll be walking into Dunkin' sporting my AE jeans.')
A post shared by Dunkin' (@dunkin) 'Whenever I'm working with clients and they have a new campaign coming, I always ask them, like, 'Okay, 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?' And if visibility is what they're looking for, then, you know, obviously I wouldn't gear them towards this specific strategy. But I wouldn't be surprised if other brands say visibility is what we're looking for, and someone might have the idea of doing something that blurs the line,' said Gauchier.
Experts agree that Sydney Sweeney is always winning. She emerges from this national dust-up only more powerful than ever.
'Certainly, it makes me very uncomfortable to think that Sydney Sweeney, this particular human being, should be targeted,' said Sayantani DasGupta, a senior lecturer in narrative medicine at Columbia University who went to TikTok to talk about the ads. 'It's not about blaming or pointing fingers. It's about saying, we all live in this society. We all are both creating and perceiving these images, and we're all ultimately going to be impacted by them.'
'She 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's not,' said Sam Bodrojan, a freelance film critic. 'She 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 — but nobody is ever really asserting that she is a bad person, and if they are, it just makes her more marketable.'
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.
Rachel Rodgers, an associate professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University, did a study on the ads for American Eagle's 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 'best friend vibe' and seeing women whose diverse bodies looked like their own. Her belief was that the new ads featuring Sweeney would succeed — by making women feel bad and ugly. 'We know that typically, idealized and sexualized media images are detrimental to body image and to mood,' she said. 'They typically make people feel worse about themselves and are designed to do so, because that's one of the things that drives consumption.'
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. 'The thing that has been lost, for me, is that this whole initiative is to benefit domestic violence and a domestic violence charity,' said Overton. 'That is something that has really been lost in the sauce with all of the accolades and criticism. If that was the talent's intention, if that was the brand's intention, they're failing on that.'
No. We are done. May we suggest next learning about the demise of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or the sport of wife-carrying?