Is Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle Campaign Just Pervy or Something Darker?
Interestingly, some of the worst-offending videos no longer appear on the brand's own social media accounts.
Photo: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images Dirt Bag
Last week, American Eagle unveiled its latest ploy to sell moderately priced denim to millennials and zoomers: Sydney Sweeney. That’s about it; the pin-up of every third heterosexual boy and man seems the company’s sole selling strategy. And for a few days, the markets at least seemed to think it would work. Twenty-four hours after the first advertisement dropped (and went viral), Business Insider reported that American Eagle’s stocks surged 12 percent. Then, it got weird.
Since then, American Eagle’s social media accounts have been flooded with predictably boring, trad, horny videos of Sweeney. There’s the one in which she “fixes” a classic car (engine revving and all), and another that features a gratuitous shot of her breasts as she jokingly says, “Hey, eyes up here!”
But none seemed to cause outrage quite like this one. In the video, Sweeney explains in her signature vocal fry that I guess really gets some people going, that genes are “passed down from parents to offspring.” Given the tagline for the advertisement is “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” and she’s busty, blond-haired, and blue-eyed, many people have since pointed out a potential implication of this messaging.
“I’m not even gonna do the whole ‘not to be that friend that’s too woke’ bs bc idgaf but this is like, clear evidence that we are in FASCIST times..they got an Aryan race girl from a MAGA family doing eugenic ads for JEANS,” tweeted one person. “Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle commercial is basically about ethnic cleansing. Her initials are SS. Can it be more obvious?” wrote another. To make matters worse (or at least weirder), the profits from Sweeney’s collaboration are supposedly going to Crisis Text Line (which doesn’t have a stellar reputation; in recent years, the non-profit has been mired in multiple controversies—from improper data sharing to workplace misconduct).
To be clear, I am not endorsing these perhaps hastily drawn conclusions. Even without the weird coincidences of some of the more “14 words” sounding taglines, the ads themselves are textbook examples of “sex sells.” It will be interesting to see if, in this case, it actually does… So far, AE stock is ever-so-slightly up today.