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“American Eagle’s ‘great jeans’ advertising campaign with actor Sydney Sweeney is at the center of the latest political firestorm online, drawing accusations of racial undertones in its messaging. Sweeney, who rose to fame for her starring roles in HBO’s ‘Euphoria’ and ‘The White Lotus,’ is the star of the clothing retailer’s latest denim-focused fall campaign, with the tagline, ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.’…
“It’s a play on words for Sweeney’s ‘great genes.’ Indeed, in one clip, which accrued more than 1.1 million views on American Eagle’s Instagram page, Sweeney stands before a poster of herself titled, ‘Sydney Sweeney has great genes,’ before the word ‘genes’ is crossed out and replaced with ‘jeans.’” NBC News
The left is divided about the campaign.
“The first thing I thought of when I heard the tagline ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans’ was the [Department of Homeland Security] Instagram account, which posted a subtly racist painting a few weeks ago and an explicitly racist painting last week. The latter depicted a gigantic blonde buxom woman chasing away Native people to make way for White settlers. When this is the imagery being promoted by our government, a pun about ‘genes’ hits differently…
“I think what’s getting people talking… is how regressive the ads seem… For the past five or six years, it seemed like fashion and pop culture were very interested in — even dedicated to — body positivity. Now we’re being fed a lot of images of thinness, whiteness and unapologetic wealth porn.”
Rachel Tashjian and Shane O’Neill, Washington Post
“‘Maybe I’m too … woke,’ one viral post read, ‘but getting a blue-eyed, blonde, white woman and focusing your campaign around her having perfect genetics feels weird…
’“Eugenics movements in the U.S. often promoted the idea of ‘good genes’ to encourage reproduction among white, able-bodied people while justifying the forced sterilization of others. Critics say those ideas still show up in modern advertising… One commenter summed up the tension: ‘It’s not just about the jeans. It’s about who gets to be the face of America’s ‘best genes.’”
CK Smith, Salon
Others argue, “This paranoid liberal impulse to see fascist dog whistles everywhere ends up functionally doing the far right’s job for them. We disown the most popular, iconic parts of American life—blue jeans! Hollywood sex symbols! Beautiful blonde women! We run from the center of our own culture like it’s radioactive, then act surprised when reactionaries move in to claim it…
“Sydney Sweeney is not a Nazi. She’s a Beach Boys song made flesh. She’s the wholesome sex symbol, the wink of sunlit Americana in denim cutoffs. She’s blonde, hot, and smiling—and for some reason, that now triggers an entire class of progressive panic attacks. The left shouldn’t be telling people that if they find Sydney Sweeney attractive, they’re one goose step from fascism. That is not a winning frame.”
Ben Dreyfuss, Calm Down
“A Hollywood starlet using sexuality to hawk denim—is there anything so American? But times have changed, and these days, a blond, blue-eyed white woman being held up as the exemplar of ‘great genes’ is a concept that maybe shouldn’t have made it past the copywriters room…
“Even if the certified geniuses who came up with this campaign didn’t mean to promote the Aryan ideal in their lingering shots of Sweeney’s denim-clad body, I’m not surprised that it’s come to this… For months now, a Sydney Sweeney backlash has been brewing; this ill-conceived ad campaign was just the inflection point.”
Jenny G. Zhang, Slate
The right defends the campaign, and pushes back against allegations of racism.
The right defends the campaign, and pushes back against allegations of racism.
“The body positivity movement told us, loudly and constantly, that everyone is beautiful, that all bodies are worthy of the spotlight, that a triple chin was not only normal, but empowering… And now here comes Sweeney, basking in her exceptional, remarkable, jaw-dropping body. Selling sex and looking like an unreformed Victoria’s Secret Angel, draped across a convertible in low-rise denim…
“She’s a kind of a walking middle finger to the movement that tried to blow up all of our old-fashioned ideas about beauty… She has the kind of face you’d cast to play a starlet in 1953. And the most offensive part of all? She knows it. She’s not ashamed. She’s just standing there, looking like that, and making bank…
“And that, more than anything, is what’s driving people insane. Because it proves people still want to look at beautiful people. They still want to buy what they’re wearing. They still respond to sex.”
Kara Kennedy, Free Press
“If American Eagle had launched the campaign with Zendaya, Sweeney’s co-star in the TV series Euphoria, most of these critics wouldn’t care. And if they did, they would salute the transgressiveness of it. Normal people use the phrase ‘good genes’ to describe not intricate Nazi breeding programs, but the fact that they’re blessed with endowments or abilities they didn’t have to work for or didn’t have to work very hard at…
“Not one person in a thousand says, ‘I have good genes’ to suggest that they are the culmination of a generations long breeding scheme like Paul Atreides in Dune (a movie Zendaya starred in, to the outrage of no one). If I can an add a note of seriousness to this, if you have no problem with the term ‘good genes’ when used by and about black or brown people, but suddenly become outraged when used for a white person and start spewing theories about the evil of ‘whiteness’—you’re the one with a racial prejudice problem.”
Jonah Goldberg, The Dispatch
“This incident illustrates the preposterous double standard that our would-be arbiters of taste routinely apply to quotidian uses of the English language. When the phrase at hand is, say, ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Globalize the intifada’ or ‘Defund the police,’ we are treated to exquisite journeys into nuance and context, alongside detailed dissections of how words are translated from one language to another…
“In those cases, we are assured that nobody who says any of those things actually means them — even when their utterance is attached to a clear declaration of intent. But when American Eagle makes an advertisement for denim, all hell breaks loose… The core point here — the sole purpose of the not-especially-good genes/jeans pun, and of the campaign more broadly — is that Sydney Sweeney is attractive. That’s it.”
Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review
