Degrading, racist, sexist, shot to satisfy the male gaze… every detail of Sydney Sweeney’s new ad campaign for American Eagle has drawn harsh criticism. For the past week or so, social networks have been abuzz with indignation at images of the actress posing lasciviously in her “great jeans”—a tagline that has eugenicist undertones, according to detractors.
Now, even Donald Trump apparently has an opinion on the matter. “She’s a registered Republican?” he said on Sunday after a reporter told him Sweeney’s alleged political affiliation. “Oh, now I love her ad… You’d be surprised at how many people are Republicans. That’s what I wouldn’t have known, but I’m glad you told me that. If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic.” (Sweeney is registered as a Republican in Florida, the New York Post writes, citing public voter records. A rep for the actor has not responded to a request for comment.)
One of the clips from the campaign in question begins with Sweeney, broom in hand, as she finishes pasting a poster on a wall that reads: “Sydney Sweeney has great genes.” The last word is then crossed out and replaced by “jeans.” The campaign is tongue-in-cheek, using wordplay while starring an actress whose own looks fit an old beauty ideal: lanky figure, fine features, big blue eyes, blonde hair. In another ad, we see Sweeney reclining on a couch as she squirms while fastening her pants and whispers, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My genes are blue.” Then a male narrator concludes, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
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Though Sweeney stars in the ads, the Euphoria actress obviously did not write them. American Eagle itself has been accused of promoting eugenics, a theory developed in the second half of the 19th century and used by the Nazis that claims certain strains of human genes are superior to others. “There’s something to the fact that this company is called American Eagle, she’s in jeans, with a car, with a dog,” professor and fashion historian Emma McClendon tells CNN. “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.”
The rhetoric has reached the highest echelons of conservative politics. Before Trump spoke out, J.D. Vance, happily jumped on the polemical bandwagon. Speaking to Ruthless, a conservative podcast, he urged his political opponents to continue showing their displeasure at the campaign. (No Democratic figures have actually commented on the ad; the backlash has been driven by laypeople on social media.)
Either way, Vance still gave the left some unsolicited counsel: “My political advice to the Democrats is, continue to tell everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi. That appears to be their actual strategy,” he said. To him, this is proof that “so much of the Democrats is oriented around hostility to basic American life. So you have a pretty girl doing a jeans ad and they can’t help but freak out.”
“That’s how you’re going to win the midterm, especially young American men.”
White House spokesman Steve Cheung, has also come out against critics of the ads. “Cancel culture run amok,” he wrote on X. “This warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024. They’re tired of this bullshit.”
Faced with the scale of the controversy, American Eagle took its eyes off the curve of its rising stock market share for a few moments to reaffirm via Instagram that this campaign “is and always has been about jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We will continue to celebrate the fact that everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, in their own way. Great jeans look good on everyone.” It remains to be seen whether “everyone” will still want these “great jeans” when the dust settles.
Original story in VF France.
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