Shock jock Kyle Sandilands has taken aim at critics of an American Eagle advertising campaign fronted by Sydney Sweeney.
Earlier this week, critics including Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel, Lola Bakare and Tricia Melton slammed described the campaign as racist and a nod to Nazi eugenics theory.
The campaign, ‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’, is a series of videos of Sweeney dressed up in a full denim outfit discussing how great her genes are (see video below).
It has received a mixed response on social media, with some arguing it promotes eugenics, while others have described the backlash as another example of wokeism gone wrong.
“The people that claim that this is a racist ad, they are racist themselves,” said Sandilands on Kyle and Jackie O show yesterday.
“[The script] is funny. It’s scientific and a play on words because the company is selling jeans.
“She’s a beautiful girl, blonde hair, big tits, blue eyes and everyone loves her, an American sweetheart. But that doesn’t mean because she is white that she’s not allowed to celebrate being white.
“This is a normal ad that wokeness is not getting in the way of and all of the woke lunatics, they’re crazy about it. There’s nothing wrong with this ad.”
Sandilands took exception to one online critic of the ad, who he described as a “fatty” wearing “ugly glasses’ and with “no hairstyle at all”.
“These fat loons want to make everything a racial issue. You are racist, not the rest of us,” he fumed.
“All of the people complaining about the ad, when you look at them you realise it’s the loons that have got the problem.”
Co-host Jackie O struck a more diplomatic tone about the controversy, saying: “There are always going to be people who complain and are outraged but I feel like there are more things you should be outraged by, not necessarily this jeans ad.”
Earlier this week, brand consultant and marketing professor Mark Ritson questioned whether “we lost our collective minds” by being outraged by the ad. He believes the ultimate winner from the backlash will be American Eagle.
“The relatively minor status of the American Eagle brand for most current fashion buyers means that whatever the company loses in sales from a few super radical trendies, it will surely win a hundred fold back from consumers who don’t care, don’t see any of the nonsense but who are suddenly aware and readily salient for a brand that they never thought of before,” he said.
Meanwhile, American rapper Lizzo weighed in on the scandal by lampooing Sweeney’s the ad in a social media post.
