The American star of Netflix’s Euphoria and The White Lotus has caused controversy for an advertising campaign for the clothing company American Eagle.
The advertising 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. It features Sweeney in some risqué poses, in one scene the camera zooms down to her breasts before she asks it to pan back to her face.
Aside from social media, the campaign will run at a Sphere takeover in Las Vegas, at 3D billboards in New York and LA and through a partnership with Euphoria.
Sweeney collaborated with American Eagle to create a winter line of jeans with proceeds supporting a domestic violence charity Crisis Text Line.
Early evidence is that the campaign has worked. Within a day of the tie-up, American Eagle’s stock price surged by 12 per cent adding more than US$200 million in market capitalisation, a strong result in a challenging year.
Nonetheless, and is often the case with Sweeney campaigns, not all consumers and marketing observers were impressed.
The ad has been slated for two reasons. Firstly, it shows Sweeney in sexually suggestive positions. Many have pointed out how incongruous this is with the line of jeans being used to raise money for a charity that provides mental health support to victims of domestic abuse.
Perhaps the more pointed criticism is that the ads are allegedly “racist, sexist, and eugenics-coded”, using language that celebrates Sweeney’s blue eyes and how it is the result of good jeans.
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Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel, the author of Cultural Intelligence for Marketers, described the campaign as “one of the most outrageously racist marketing outputs I’ve seen in quite a while”.
“I haven’t been this disgusted since ZARA wrapped corpse-like mannequins in white cloth while thousands of civilians were being bombarded you know where in 2023,” she said in a LinkedIn post.
“When read semiotically, this marketing campaign parades the same symbols and codes long used to prop up eugenicist fantasies of racial supremacy and—by extension—MAGA.
Gabriel said that use of the term “blue blood” comes from the Spanish phrase “sangre azul”, which refers to the pale skin of the European aristocracy with “visible blue veins” and is seen as proof of a “so-called pure” lineage that was “untainted” by non-European ancestry.
She added: “Think a little about the ideological assumptions encoded in the media you consume and what’s actually being sold here.
“It’s not just selling denim. It’s an ad campaign firmly rooted in the ideology of American whiteness.”
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Global CMO advisor and inclusive marketing strategist Lola Bakare and a former Cairns Crocodiles keynote speaker has also taken aim at the play on genes with jeans.
“Did we all forget about WWII. We all get the word play around jeans/genes…I’m surprised to see so many of my colleagues celebrating this without seeing the extremely harmful connotations.
“If Sydney Sweeney has good genes in Magamerica 2025…tell me, pray tell Craig Brommers – who has bad genes? Everyone who doesn’t shop at American Eagle Outfitters Inc.?…or everyone who doesn’t look like Sydney Sweeney?”
Sweeney is no stranger to controversial ads. Her work with Dr. Squatch turned heads when she fronted a campaign to sell Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater scented soap earlier this year.
