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Jeans or Genes?

30 October 2026

I wrote this for my English 101 class where our assignment was to analyze the rhetorical appeals of a visual analysis.

We open to an actress lying on a cream-colored loveseat. The camera pans up her body as she slowly fastens the zipper and buttons of her jeans. As she works her way up her denim attire, a voiceover plays: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” The camera moves to her face, revealing the actress to be Sydney Sweeney, who looks at the audience with her blue eyes and blonde hair and says, “My jeans are blue.” The ad closes with the voiceover and text: “SYDNEY SWEENEY HAS GREAT JEANS” and the American Eagle logo.

American Eagle is best known for its casual denim and youthful branding, but this wasn’t always the case. Brothers Jerry and Mark Silverman founded the brand in 1977 after succeeding with their growing menswear business. Walking into an American Eagle used to feel more like walking into a store for lumberjacks than one for teenage girls, since the brand positioned itself as an outdoor sports retailer. Over time, the menswear business struggled, so in 1991, the Silverman brothers sold American Eagle to Schottenstein Stores Corp. Over the next decade, American Eagle fully established itself as a youth-focused aesthetic, with cargo pants, graphic tees, and affordable denim. The company boomed when it became the official outfitter of the television show Dawson’s Creek in 1999, where teens wore American Eagle clothes in every episode, transforming it into the brand for high schoolers and college students. The success didn’t stop there: in 2006, American Eagle launched Aerie, an intimate apparel and activewear line aimed at young women. In 2014, the brand launched the #AerieREAL campaign, vowing to completely stop digitally editing its models and promote real, diverse body types. This transformation captured the loyalty of Gen Z teen girls.

Fast forward about ten years, and we have American Eagle trying to defend its brand in a competitive back-to-school season. In July 2025, American Eagle launched the “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign, with a series of ads featuring Sweeney in similar denim outfits, repeating the homophones “jeans” and “genes.” In this particular ad, Sweeney directly references a 1980 Calvin Klein ad featuring a 15-year-old Brooke Shields. Shields, a young, blonde, blue-eyed girl, uses the same wordplay in a monologue while struggling to pull up jeans over her underwear. However, there's no mention of the “my jeans are blue” that Sweeney recites. The Calvin Klein ads drew immediate outrage for being oversexualized, and years later Shields stated that she was “naive” to the sexual innuendos of the campaign. So why, forty-five years later and despite the backlash, would American Eagle create a campaign like this?

American Eagle didn’t want to pay homage to or support women with this campaign: the ad was a deliberate stunt to capitalize on its provocativeness and drive virality to sales. Upon its release, the ad immediately sparked intense criticism and debate online. On one hand, people saw it as a dog whistle: appearing innocent on the outside but containing a hidden message. The voiceover on genetics was not simply a reference to an old ad. This discourse draws from eugenics, a discredited theory that claimed humanity could be “improved” through controlled breeding. Eugenics ranked some groups above others, often implying that white, Eurocentric traits like the blonde hair and blue eyes that Sweeney has are superior, and labeled others as “unfit.” “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” is not just a funny homophone but a marketing stunt with a hidden meaning. On the other hand, some people took it at face value: a pretty girl filming a jeans ad. Politicians started weighing in, including Ted Cruz and J.D. Vance, and even President Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, "Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there."

In the ad's visuals, there are no appeals to logos that would make a consumer want to buy a pair of American Eagle jeans. Although she's in a denim-on-denim outfit, there is no logical reason given to go out and shop for these jeans. Nine of the ad’s fifteen seconds show Sweeney's body as the subject, with the seductive closing of the zipper and the open denim top. The synchronization of the voiceover is intentional: “hair color” timed with a glimpse of Sweeney's blonde locks, “eye color” said alongside her reveal–a look into the camera with her blue eyes. The buildup and reveal of Sweeney, a Gen Z sensation, shows an appeal to ethos: use her star power as a framing to get teen girls to shop at American Eagle. However, if American Eagle’s audience is teen and young-adult women, why are most of the emotions built for someone gazing at Sweeney rather than someone identifying with her? The camera treats the viewer as an observer of her body, not as her. Rather than appealing to the audience, like the previous #AerieREAL campaign, showing diverse body types, this ad is intentional in its desire to provoke conversation and heated debate. An ad designed for teenage girls to see themselves would not be filmed this way–only an ad that is designed to be watched, reposted, and debated would.

In the aftermath of the ad, American Eagle stood by its campaign, claiming the campaign “is and always was about the jeans.” On the other hand, in a now-deleted LinkedIn post, vice president of American Eagle Marketing Ashley Schapiro spoke about a Zoom call she had with Sweeney during the campaign planning. “During a Zoom call with Sydney, we asked the question, 'How far do you want to push it?'” Schapiro wrote. “Without hesitation, she smirked and said, 'Let’s push it; I’m game.” She later explained that the campaign was saturated with “our own personal cheeky energy and a desire to stretch beyond anything we had done before.” This clearly shows intentionality, especially from a marketing executive who defines the campaign's scope. American Eagle knew that its ad would cause a firestorm, and so the response alleging it’s just about the jeans is a stunt designed for farming social media engagement.

One thing not mentioned in the ad is that with every purchase of a “Sydney Jean,” designed in collaboration with Sweeney herself, with butterfly patch detailing, 100% of the purchase price would be directly donated to the Crisis Text Line, a mental health nonprofit, specifically to fund resources for domestic violence awareness and survivors. American Eagle creates a juxtaposition: why would a brand hide its most sympathetic message behind its most provocative one? Doing good arguably diminishes the shock factor of a campaign, as no one can argue against donating to charity. By intentionally choosing provocative virality over highlighting its support for a good cause, American Eagle revealed its real priority: engagement farming over supporting women, and left the cause it claimed to support as an afterthought. American Eagle announced the donation in its press release, but not in the ad, which had more time to discuss genes versus jeans rather than its support for domestic violence survivors.

The controversial campaign did result in some immediate success. In the weeks following the campaign's release, American Eagle's stock jumped 25%, with the ad generating 40 billion impressions and bringing in over 700,000 new customers to American Eagle. Despite the upward trend, by the end of the following quarter, while comparable sales rose 4%, this was largely due to Aerie’s success, growing 11%, while the American Eagle brand, which ran the ad, grew only 1%. These sales are also attributed to a Travis Kelce campaign, which ran concurrently with the Sweeney campaign. This goes to show that despite American Eagle putting its brand image and values on the line by running a provoking, polarizing campaign intentionally, the payoff was smaller than the attention. The campaign was American Eagle's most expensive campaign to date, with a takeover of the Sphere in Las Vegas, a 3D billboard in Times Square, bus wraps, and ads all over social media, yet the brand only grew 1%. Meanwhile, Aerie, the brand built on diverse identities of women, grew substantially. Consumers are looking for a brand that represents them, not rage-baits them. Nearly a year later, even alongside another campaign featuring Sweeney in 2026, women’s jeans continued to struggle, with Jen Foyle, President and Creative Director of American Eagle, saying, “We are not satisfied with where the business performed this quarter, especially in women’s.” The ad won attention, but didn’t win over women.

Weeks after American Eagle’s ad, denim competitor Gap released its “Better in Denim” campaign with KATSEYE, an international girl group that has boomed in popularity with young girls over the past few years. The ad is a striking visual contrast to the Sweeney campaign, with KATSEYE dancing in various denim styles to Kelis’s “Milkshake.” The ad has dancers of different races, showing that anyone can wear Gap's attire. In a statement released by Gap, the campaign “captures the spirit of individuality — championing denim as a canvas for self-expression, unity, and style that transcends generations.” Later in the statement, it states exactly what each girl is wearing, how much it retails for, and unveils a limited-edition KATSEYE logo hoodie for $70. The ad garnered 400 million views across social platforms, and Gap reported better-than-expected quarterly results, especially in its denim section. An ad can go just as viral by celebrating its audience instead of provoking them.

Every part of the “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign was constructed to spark controversy. The ad is only fifteen seconds, but from the voiceover to the color scheme to the choice of actress and style of the ad, American Eagle made deliberate choices in provoking its audience. American Eagle succeeded in creating virality around its brand; however, not all press is good press. In the process, it shone a light on its values, putting controversy over women in order to generate attention. Ultimately, the attention didn’t drive any lasting sales, with women's jeans still underperforming. Meanwhile, its sister brand Aerie and competitor Gap grew by celebrating women and highlighting confidence as their message. American Eagle’s campaign is a lesson to marketers: controversy produces clicks; relatability gets customers.

Works Cited