Updated July 29, 2025 at 4:09 PM CDT
Sydney Sweeney's "great jeans" are causing quite a stir — and it's not because of the quality of the denim.
Clothing retailer American Eagle's latest ad campaign centers around the 27-year-old star, known for roles in Euphoria, Anyone But You and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
The campaign's tagline —"Sydney Sweeney has great jeans" — plays on the word "genes" which naturally leads viewers to think about the genetics of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman.
"Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My genes are blue," Sweeney says in one video.
The campaign has sparked backlash online. Some social media users have accused American Eagle of teasing at eugenics, a discredited scientific theory popular among white supremacists that the human race could be improved by breeding out less desirable traits. NPR reached out to American Eagle and a publicist for Sweeney for comment but has not received a response yet.
In the view of one advertising expert, the social media backlash is part of the point. The nature of the ads are one of the few ways companies can break through the noise in this day and age, Allen Adamson, co-founder of brand marketing firm Metaforce, told Morning Edition. Sweeney's ads have been compared to Brooke Shields' 1980 ad campaign for Calvin Klein jeans when she was 15. Critics argued that the brand was sexualizing the underage Shields, who told Vogue in 2021 she thought the backlash was "ridiculous."
The Sweeney-centric campaign "was a company figuring out how to break through in a world where everyone is screaming and saying, 'Look at me, look at me!" Adamson said.
He also told NPR's Steve Inskeep that the ad is indicative of a shift away from a more inclusive form of advertising seen over the past few years.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Steve Inskeep: Well, part of [the ad] is getting this particularly arresting person who is very much part of the zeitgeist, part of the culture right now. But the other is that play on the word jeans. Why do that?
Allen Adamson: Because people remember disruption. People remember the edge. Pushing buttons. And this is really important for products that are commodities. Jeans are commodities. You can get them for $20 at Costco and the GAP. And they're selling them for a lot more than that.
Inskeep: There was some social media commentary about there being something racist about this. And I get that. I understand people raising that. But I think there's also something real here, isn't it?
Adamson: You know, for years the tide was flowing in a different direction. There was pressure on advertisers to diversify, to show people in ads that usually were not shown in that because that was unusual. All the ads had a sort of Leave It to Beaver, old fashioned look. They all cast the same central casting people and category by category, but particularly fashion, where you need to get attention because the product itself is not different and unique. It's not like an iPhone.
Inskeep: I read that years ago advertisers were looking for spokespeople that seemed to be of an almost indeterminate race, like they might be any one of two or three or four categories, as if to appeal to everybody in the country. Clearly, that's not what American Eagle is going for here.
Adamson: Not here. But part of it was there was first to check the box category where you wanted many, many diverse people representing your brand to be inclusive, which was good for business, because when people saw themselves in ads and say, 'Hey, these products are for me.' Then that became commonplace and it didn't feel like you could notice it. And so then they said, what may be more efficient is to find somebody who represents more than one bucket.
Inskeep: And in this case, you go for an extremely distinctive person. And it seems to have worked because we're talking about it.
Adamson: Yeah, they won the attention game. And in advertising, the worst part is no one saw your ad.
This digital article was edited by Majd Al-Waheidi. The radio version was produced by Mansee Khurana and Nia Dumas.
Copyright 2025 NPR
