You mean to tell me, a brand called American Eagle, made a racist ad? My jaw remains firmly in place.
The online world has been completely enthralled by the new campaign by American jean brand American Eagle, starring White Lotus and Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney. The public have taken to social media to express their disgust at the ad, which many have deemed to be an obvious dog whistle for eugenics and racialised superiority.
It’s safe to say that after Sweeney’s controversial bathwater soap scandal, she’s officially back in hot water. Though we will undoubtedly be talking about Sweeney and her not-so-innocent part in this, my main focus will be on American Eagle and the campaign itself. I’m finding a lot of conversations are centring Sweeney in a rather unproductive way; it’s become kind of an online echo chamber that thrives on outrage but entirely lacks context, which hopefully I will add.
The campaign
The campaign consists of several short, minimalist ads against a plain backdrop with an uncomfortable lingering male-gaze-esque shot of Sweeney in American Eagle jeans. All of which end with a male voice saying, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
One shows Sweeney fixing a car. One shows her with a puppy while filming her face with another camera with assuredly sexual undertones. One has an almost porn style ‘casting theme’ where superstar actress Sydney Sweeney plays up her innocence to act like she is at a casting for the ad itself. Another is literally just a silent 10-second shot that pans up from her butt to a bird’s-eye view of her cleavage. Another is a slow, lingering male gaze shot from her head down to her waist, where she is doing up said jeans, followed by Sweeney confidently saying, “I bet you want to try these jeans.”
But the defining ad in the collection, the one that has everyone talking, shows Sweeney lying topless on the floor, loosely wearing a denim jacket while doing up the jeans in question. This shot is accompanied by her saying: “My body’s composition is determined by my genes. Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue. Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
Many have drawn comparisons to a Calvin Klein ad starring Brooke Shields from the ’90s. Similarly, Shields, while on the floor trying to do up her jeans, recites a monologue similar to Sweeney’s – though Shield’s is far more troubling – in which she explains selective reproduction, aka positive eugenics.
What is eugenics? And what has it got to do with this ad?
The response to the ad has been loud, to say the least. And people are rightly mad. Many have called it nazi propaganda. One X user said: “That blonde blue-eyed woman talking about how good ‘jeans’ are passed down from your family and how hers are ‘blue’ is such a blatant dog whistle that it can hardly be considered a dog whistle anymore.”
For anyone unfamiliar, eugenics is the belief in controlling human reproduction to “improve” genetic qualities. Eugenics has been used to justify forced sterilisations, racist immigration laws, anti-Black violence, and the systemic erasure of disabled people. And in the US, its legacy is everywhere, from 20th-century “fitter family” contests at state fairs (where white families were awarded prizes for their supposed biological superiority) to Trump’s recent speeches about immigrants “poisoning” the country’s gene pool.
Creator Sayantani DasGupta laid this out clearly in a TikTok breakdown of the ad. She explains how ads do more than just sell you a product, and the imagery of this ad is drenched in a history of eugenics, white supremacy and racial violence that has always used this kind of language to sell the idea of a superior body.
There’s also the not-so-subtle reference to “blue blood”, a phrase that dates back to Spanish aristocracy and was used to distinguish pale-skinned European nobles from darker-skinned commoners. The visibility of veins was seen as proof of racial purity – a clean, undiluted lineage. So when Sydney Sweeney, a white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, draped in denim, says her jeans are great and blue, it does feel like a nod, intentional or not, to that very specific cultural ‘ideal’.
Even if the people involved didn’t mean it that way, there are consequences to evoking this stuff so carelessly. Especially now, when fascist talking points are circling back into mainstream conversation and politicians in the US are openly talking about “protecting” American DNA.
Some context behind the ad
I’m sure some of you are screaming “‘intentional or not’?? How could it not be?!”. Listen, I’m not saying it wasn’t, but let me try and shed some light on the situation as a non-white woman who is both very familiar and tired of these conversations, as well as having a background working in social media marketing. And if I can’t, allow me to also share the perspective of the ex-social media manager of American Eagle, who recently shared her thoughts on TikTok from her account @haailss3.
According to her, none of this surprises her. She worked on the social team and says outright that the people in charge (senior leadership, not the teams creating content) had no idea who their customer was. Their main priority wasn’t inclusion, relevance, or even creativity. In her words: “The only thing I heard from the second that I got there until I quit was, how can we be Abercrombie or better?”
The content her team was making, according to her, was the best they had ever created because, as a former store employee, she understood the audience and was able to successfully appeal to them. However, that only translated to engagement, not sales, so leadership pivoted.
This is where I can offer a bit of insight, too. When it comes to corporate brands, the social media team and the influencer team are often completely separate. Big ad campaigns like this are signed off far above them. Marketing teams might get to give feedback, but they’re rarely leading the process, especially when a celebrity is involved. And from my experience, it doesn’t matter what you say or the statistics you give them, if an exec has decided on a direction, that’s it.
Another common comment I see is “how did this get through so many people?”. Again, it’s not that simple. Often, there are too many people working on a project, and responsibility is shifted from one department to another until no one knows who’s supposed to be doing what anymore. This is absolutely not in defence of American Eagle, but I think it helps to have a realistic understanding of what happens behind the scenes.
@haailss3 also hinted that she believes someone probably did raise concerns. Because when she was there, she said her social team were quite conscious about content going out that might send the wrong message. All of this to say that the issue most likely lies with leadership.
So who are those people? Jay Schottenstein has been American Eagle’s CEO since 2015, and if you’re looking for a sense of the brand’s values, a glance at his donation history paints the picture pretty clearly. He’s a Trump supporter. He’s donated over $150,000 to Netanyahu. He funds pro-Israel lobbying efforts and donates to the IDF. This is a man with strong political affiliations, and they’re not aligned with inclusion or human rights. It’s not difficult to imagine how a campaign like this got through under his leadership.
If I were to take a guess, he probably approved the ad not because he orchestrated a eugenics-themed campaign but because he knows (say it with me) sex sells. And it has. After the campaign dropped, American Eagle’s stock jumped by 18%. Their market value increased by about $200 million. Just because it has backlash does not mean this was not successful. It’s financially very successful, and at the end of the day, I’m sure that’s all Jay cares about.
How much blame should we place on Sydney Sweeney?
Now, back to Sydney Sweeney. It’s impossible to completely separate her from this, because she is the face of the campaign. But she didn’t direct it. She didn’t write the script. She didn’t produce the shoot. And the way people are piling on her as if she’s the mastermind behind it is, frankly, a bit of misdirection.
That said, she’s not entirely innocent. This is not Sweeney’s first time packaging up her own sexual appeal as a product. There have been many rumours describing her family as Trump supporters, and while she’s made it clear she’s not responsible for their politics, there’s still a gap between saying that and engaging with what you represent to people. Her SNL appearance last year was celebrated by the far-right as the “death of woke” – purely because she was hot and didn’t say anything political.
There’s a form of femininity that’s been carefully cultivated to seem non-threatening, agreeable, and traditionally sexy, and Sweeney embodies it to a tee. She hasn’t pushed back against being positioned as the anti-feminist it-girl of the right, and while that doesn’t mean she agrees with it, it does mean she’s benefiting from it and perpetuating it. Add to that her decision to sell literal bathwater, and yeah, she’s playing the game.
What’s particularly galling is that this campaign claims to be in support of a domestic violence helpline. Yep, you read that right. There’s a butterfly motif on the back of the jeans that is supposed to signal this. Except that the ad is entirely sexualised. It’s made for the male gaze. It plays with porn tropes and casting-couch imagery. It literally features shots that pan over her body while a man’s voice narrates. To try and tie that to domestic violence awareness is beyond confusing. It’s actually incredibly disturbing and insulting.
To make things worse, @haailss3 said this was part of their back-to-school campaign. I haven’t seen confirmation of that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. That’s how utterly lost this whole campaign is.
And ultimately, the brand chose Sydney. They knew what she represented. They knew her media image. They made that choice deliberately.
A case of white ignorance
Any person of colour understands that feeling where a fact that you think is indisputable will simply ricochet off a white person, and no matter how you phrase it or tailor it to their level of understanding, their white armour remains impenetrable. Because what is clear as day to us through a lifetime of experience, is invisible to them – a non-issue or simply a vague idea up for debate.
White ignorance functions like armour in moments like this. It lets people say, “we didn’t know”, even when the rest of us are hoarse from saying it again and again. There’s a collective refusal to see what is glaringly obvious to so many others, particularly people of colour, who live with the consequences of these ideologies.
At the same time, it’s hard not to feel a bit gaslit as a person of colour. While thinking through my take on this, I found myself stopping to ask whether I was reading too much into it – and the fact that I did this says a lot about how deep this kind of ignorance runs. Because for most white people, the messaging in this ad probably won’t register at all. And on some level, I think many of us hesitate to call it out too strongly, knowing that.
When your ad leans on ideas of genetic inheritance, desirability, and purity, all presented through the body of a white, slim, blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman in the middle of a political moment where white supremacy is a huge conversation, it doesn’t matter if it was intentional. You’ve still done it. You’ve still normalised it. You’ve still fed it back into the culture. If anything, it’s worse because how could you not see what this means to people like us? How are you so privileged, so ignorant, that the thought didn’t even cross your mind? That goes for both American Eagle leadership and Sydney Sweeney.
Do I think there’s a chance this was done intentionally? Yes, it’s entirely possible the world has gotten so dark that this brand is brazen enough to do something as distressing as this publicly. However, I think it’s more likely another misogynistic example of over-sexualising a woman because (say it with me) sex sells, thinking you’re clever by saying she’s got good genes because she’s ‘hot’, and being so completely white and ignorant that you didn’t even realise you just made a piece of eugenics propaganda. And to be honest, that feels worse to me.
