Nineteen seconds. One pair of blue jeans. Hundreds of celebrity statements. Three hundred thousand daily hits on social media. This summer, Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad campaign, in which the denim-clad actress used the homophone of “genes” and “jeans” to market a pair, sparked widespread controversy and launched an online culture war. People all over the world debated the severity of the ad’s implications, from explicitly using white beauty standards to market a product to referencing the American eugenics movement. The problem with the American Eagle campaign is twofold, lying in its representation of sexualized and even exploitive marketing, as well as racialized beauty standards.
As earth-shattering as this ad may seem, it is far from original. American Eagle seemed to be intentionally referencing an equally controversial marketing campaign launched by Calvin Klein in 1980, in which a then-15-year-old Brooke Shields described the process of natural selection while wearing a pair of blue jeans to match her bright blue eyes. The speech was laced with double entendres, delivered as she moved suggestively on TV screens throughout America. Many argued that the ad was inappropriate for a minor and that Shields was exploited, a sentiment later echoed by the actress herself. In her documentary “Pretty Baby,” Shields reflects on being too young to even understand the innuendos in her monologue or the reputation it would give her, continuing into her professional career.
It is deeply unsettling to think that a 21st-century company would launch an ad that not only pays homage to this dark side of commercialism but also contains even more explicit references to a racialized beauty standard. Yet, this just ties into a wider problem of today’s culture—the desire to return to an America governed by racial uniformity. The so-called “good old days” often translate to a society in which white women like Sydney Sweeney are considered exclusively beautiful, and the overt sexualization of women for the purpose of advertisement is normalized.
American Eagle likely did not intend for the “genes” pun to reference the eugenics movement. However, the message sent by the ad was clear. In less than a minute, Sydney Sweeney became the newest face of a regressive commercial trend that has existed in the United States for generations: consumerism is best promoted by the promise of thin, white, blue-eyed beauty that is considered conventionally, quintessentially American.
Even today, companies are still using this twisted pattern to their benefit, still glamorizing a past in which women were sexualized for advertisement purposes and beauty was confined to rigid, westernized standards. Let’s not romanticize and reconstruct a world in which it is OK to exploit a minor’s sexuality, in which implicit biases and beauty standards are used for commercial gain. Instead, may we dare to defy the code of our collective DNA and move forward into a future that might just be a little brighter.
