This article was originally published at CNN.com
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.
Did American Eagle intend to make a white-supremacist dog-whistle ad?
“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.”
“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.”
Wait. Did the Coldplay couple somehow make this happen as a distraction?
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.”
Read the full article at CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/02/entertainment/sydney-sweeney-american-eagle-ad-dunkin-drama-cec