Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle are facing backlash over an ad campaign featuring wordplay about having good jeans/genes.
Sydney Sweeney for American Eagle jeans
Last week, American Eagle launched a campaign with videos and photos featuring Sweeney sporting their denim. The theme of the whole thing was “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” which sometimes meant the ads themselves focused on the wordplay of jeans vs genes.
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” she says in one ad. “My jeans are blue.”
The backlash
Some people didn’t feel great about a blonde, blue-eyed, white woman being the face of a campaign focused around “great genes” in the current political climate. To them, it’s a little too evocative of eugenics, a widely discredited theory revolving around “selective breeding to improve the human race” and that was most closely linked to Nazi Germany.
On the other side of the argument, you’ve got both people saying that too much is being read into a silly little ad and people actively celebrating a rejection of “wokeness.”
Even Doja Cat got in on the action.
And then there was this very good question:
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