American Eagle is a US-founded vogue model that sells denims, shrunken “child” T-shirts and cropped sweatshirts to predominantly tween and teenage ladies. On TikTok, customers gush about their garments in outfit-of-the-day posts or purchasing hauls. This week, nevertheless, the model discovered itself dealing with backlash over its new marketing campaign, starring the 27-year-old White Lotus and Euphoria actor Sydney Sweeney, during which critics are alleging American Eagle makes use of the language of eugenics to attempt to promote denim.
The marketing campaign depicts Sweeney in a denim shirt and saggy denims provocatively posing as a male voice says: “Sydney Sweeney has nice denims.” In a single now-viral clip, Sweeney is filmed pasting a campaign poster on to a billboard. The poster’s textual content reads “Sydney Sweeney has nice genes denims”. In one other video that has since been faraway from American Eagle’s social media channels, Sweeney, who has blond hair and blue eyes, says: “Genes are handed down from mother and father to offspring, typically figuring out traits like hair color, persona, and even eye color. My denims are blue.”
Critics had been fast to level out the implications of the advert’s wordplay. In a single video that has had greater than 3m views, a TikTok user in contrast it to “fascist propaganda,” including: “a blonde haired, blue-eyed white girl is speaking about her good genes, like, that’s Nazi propaganda”. On the model’s personal channels, customers are battling it out within the feedback part. “It’s giving ‘Delicate 1930’s Germany’,” reads one. One other particular person posted: “The woke crowd wants to go away the room.” Even the US senator Ted Cruz has weighed in. Reposting a information story on X, he commented: “Wow. Now the loopy Left has come out towards stunning girls. I’m positive that may ballot nicely …”
In keeping with Sophie Gilbert, a workers author on the Atlantic and creator of the e book Girl on Girl which explores how popular culture is formed by misogyny: “The slogan ‘Sydney Sweeney has good denims’ clearly winks on the obsession with eugenics that’s so prevalent among the many fashionable proper.” Dr Sarah Cefai, a senior lecturer in gender and cultural research at Goldsmiths, College of London, agrees. “Actually, what had been they pondering, {that a} white supremacist fantasy has permission to be aired so conspicuously?”
Aria Halliday, an affiliate professor in gender and ladies’s research, African American and Africana research and creator of Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture, isn’t shocked by the advert. In recent times, she says, “we’ve seen an inflow of media reasserting the great thing about skinny, white, blond, and blue-eyed folks,” with many manufacturers “invested in re-presenting the wholesomeness and sanctity of conservative white values.”
Critics have additionally zeroed in on the marketing campaign’s deal with Sweeney’s physique. In one clip the digital camera zooms in on the actor’s breasts – lingering in a manner that Gilbert sees as “leering and unapologetic” – as Sweeney says: “My physique’s composition is decided by my denims.” The digital camera then cuts again to Sweeney’s face as she shouts: “Hey, eyes up right here!” For Cefai, “its sexualisation of the viewer through its voyeurism exposes western sexism as a racialised fantasy of whiteness”. American Eagle had been approached for remark by the Guardian however didn’t reply.
Trend campaigns are infamous for purposefully sparking controversy, however the denim style is a very seedy seam. In a Nineteen Eighties Calvin Klein marketing campaign, a 15-year-old Brooke Shields mused: “You realize what will get between me and my Calvin’s? Nothing.” In 1995, one other Calvin Klein advert featured fashions together with Kate Moss being filmed in a basement as they undid the highest button of their denims and had been requested: “Are you nervous?” It was criticised for alluding to youngster exploitation.
The American Eagle marketing campaign comes at a time when the US is witnessing a cultural shift centering whiteness in addition to extra conservative gender roles, whereas the Maga motion has been linked with selling a “soft eugenics” way of thinking. In 2025, there are new elements reinforcing outdated stereotypes. For Halliday, the rise of GLP-1 medicines for weight reduction and the report excessive unemployment of Black girls within the US all feed right into a wider cultural shift that’s “about recentering whiteness as what America is and who People appear to be.”
Some vogue imagery is reflecting this wider regression. The blacklisted photographer Terry Richardson is shooting for magazines and brands again, whereas Dov Charney, whose function as CEO of American Attire was terminated after allegations of sexual misconduct, is now making content material for his new brand that resembles the heavily sexualised noughties style of his former model’s promoting.
For American Eagle, a model whose greatest demographic is 15- to 25-year-old females, to tailor their marketing campaign to the male gaze appears retrograde, if not downright creepy. Nonetheless, Jane Cunningham, co-author of Brandsplaining: Why Marketing is (Still) Sexist and How to Fix It, says many gen Z-ers who’re fed a “hypersexualised visible weight loss plan” on social media might purchase into the technique. “Their perspective could also be that they’re ‘proudly owning’ their sexuality by being overtly sexual in the way in which they current,” she says, pointing to the pop star Sabrina Carpenter as one other instance of somebody who has additionally been accused of catering to the heterosexual male gaze.
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Halliday says that whereas “Black ladies are not often the target market for adverts,” some should be curious to attempt the denims: “the will to be perceived as stunning is tough to disregard,” she says.
Many gen Z-ers might not have skilled this style of promoting, or “intentional provocation as branding technique”, earlier than, says Gilbert, for whom the marketing campaign additionally reminds her of 90s Wonderbra adverts with their “Good day Boys” slogan. However perhaps they are going to come to see by it. They’re “extraordinarily savvy as shoppers”, she factors out. “They’ve the form of language and experience when it comes to deconstructing media that I couldn’t have dreamed of utilising as a teen in the course of the Nineties. And so they know when somebody is attempting to play them, which appears to be occurring right here.
She provides: “All of it feels prefer it was cooked up in a convention room to impress most controversy and most outrage, and to get most consideration.” And it appears – within the enterprise sense at the least – to be working. Because the marketing campaign launched, American Eagle’s inventory has shot up virtually 18%.
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