Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle Ad Is a Racist Mess
Today, we tackle another racist day. American Eagle has decided it is a good idea to release a Fall 2025 campaign called Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans, starring the Euphoria actress. Outrage emerged online after the very sexualized Sydney badly read from a script that compared "genes" (what’s inside our body) with "jeans" (what we wear), but many people found this offensive. It has led to discussions on harmful eugenics in this brand, and debates on these heritable characteristics that have been deemed desirable.
These ads should be analyzed because American Eagle is not just selling products; they're also selling ideas about what women should be. It is a subliminal message that should not be overlooked because the model, Sydney, is shown as blonde and blue-eyed, and the ad makes sure to highlight that with its messaging. The campaign alludes that her features are superior and the marker of desire. There has been a lot of backlash and anger given that the ads’ pseudoscientific notion is that some races are better than others.
Yet some have gone to explain that it's not a big deal and that many of us are over-reating. However, when a major brand is sexualizing a woman while talking about race, we do need to pause and critically think about what is going on.
Exploring Sydney Sweeney's Has Great Jeans Campaign
This American Eagle Fall 2025 campaign, called Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans, was created as an attempt to look for “a little mischief”, as explained by American Eagle (AE) president and executive creative director Jennifer Foyle. Yet, more than mischief, they achieved when Sweeney said in the ad. “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color…my jeans are blue [a nod to both the denim she’s wearing and her blue eyes],” followed by a voiceover stating, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
But we should analyze the voiceover itself and how she is reading, given that she sounds like a badly rehearsed speaker, her voice sounds weird, almost like she is making a bad presentation. Many people on the internet have gone on to bully her for her speech patterns and tone, given that it sounds a bit off, but the pushback may come from the sheer weirdness of the campaign.
Yet, I believe that Sydney Sweeney took this campaign on without much consideration for its impact. She has been everywhere, even in Baskin-Robbins commercials and in many different beauty campaigns. So, if she were as busy and brainless as we believe her to be, the audio could have been likely the first time she read the script.
However, being an actress or model does not absolve her of complicity in her role, especially when she attended Jeff Bezos' wedding and launched a lingerie brand with a boost from Bezos' firm.
She has also been involved in a past soap collaboration that advertised that the soap was made out of her bathwater. Soap has been historically a racialized product, which implies it can make your race cleaner, aka whiter.
These ads allude to the idea that darker-skinned people are dirty, like the Dove debacle, where the dirty African American was suddenly a white woman after the product was used. But going back to the American Eagle campaign, a TikTok user posed an interesting question we must grapple with:
Is anybody surprised that a white woman who grew up around Trump supporters would make an ad saying how much she loves her white skin?
The History of Eugenics in Fashion Collections
A striking similarity can be found between this American Eagle brand and with Calvin Klein campaign, specifically its 1980 ad starring supermodel Brooke Shields. In that campaign, a 14-year-old Shields is seen rolling on the floor, attempting to put on her jeans, while discussing how the secret of life lies behind genetic code.
These themes center on genes being fundamental in determining the characteristics of an individual and passing on these characteristics to succeeding generations. And how certain genes should fade away while others persist… which reveals how fashion brands think about who should survive and who belongs.
It also reveals how history repeats itself and even copies what has been done in the past. Yet, just because something has been done, doesn’t mean it justifies the idea that a certain race is better than the other. It also shouldn’t be a moral indicator ot a status symbol carried out in a major fashion collection.
But what is eugenics?
Tweet by White House communications director Steven Cheung
Eugenics is a pseudoscientific and immoral notion that we can improve the human race through the natural selection of traits, encouraging reproduction among people with certain positive or desirable traits.
It is insanely outrageous since negative eugenics discourages reproduction and advocates for killing off certain people with “supposed negative” traits.
It reminds me of what is happening under our current president, Trump, who is deciding that Latino immigrants are criminals and illegally sterilizing women in detention centers. But I often wonder:
Who gets to decide what negative and positive traits are?
Eugenics alludes to some who can choose for others' behalf, and so eugenics is inherently racialized and relies on radicalized ideas of superiority and ableism or cis heteronormity over anything else.
Especially American/British eugenics, which is extremely harmful and works along with the race horse theory, which is the idea that you just need better genes to get ahead, with the idea that those deemed “bad,” like immigrants, have bad genes and pollute the American kind body politic.
Latina in a Racist Fast Fashion Industry
As a Latina, I have seen other Latina women marry white men to “clean” the race and ensure a better future for themselves and their family, despite the rich beauty and culture in Latin America. This line of thinking justifies the criminalization of others and violence on innocent communities fighting for a good life and assumes that one race is better than the other. This is unjustifiable and so horrible to wrap my head around, but when the leadership group of American Eagle is a room full of white, privileged “leaders”, we see the symptoms of racism, ableism, and sheer nastiness in thought and spirit.
But should we be surprised when we all know that fast fashion pushes out certain beauty ideals, like being thin, white blue blue-eyed look we have all seen in ads and store billboards. Yet, American Eagle had been doing some more inclusive campaigns, which caused this Sydney Sweeney ad to be more jarring and even seem like a personal backstab to their past efforts.
New Real Collection by Aerie (owned by American Eagle)
The similarity between Nazi propaganda idealizing Aryan features, such as blonde hair and blue eyes, and the American Eagle campaign is striking. It suggests this is a form of Nazi propaganda, also known to be fascism, and that people who look like Sydney are worthy of belonging and deserving.
It doesn’t help that the family that owns American Eagle, the Schottenstein family, has a history of supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They even donated to his primary campaign back in 2012. In The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, the author explains how fashion is tied to colonialism and capitalism. It is such a great read, and even explains how these systems often work together to make some people rich while exploiting others, especially in the fashion industry, where people in poorer countries are paid very little to make clothes for wealthier countries.
Main Takeaways on Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle Ad
This campaign was launched with an all-white team that needs serious DEI efforts for a more diverse leadership group. And given today’s political climate and the criminalization of immigrants, this campaign is seriously tone-deaf and harmful. It clearly wasn’t made for their target demographic in mind, which is young Gen Z students still in school. Instead, it felt like a targeted move to overly sexualize women to get men’s attention, also known as the male gaze. I have a theory that American Eagle was likely targeting conservative white men who hold financial influence in the stock market. The brand's goal seems to be one where they are attracting shareholder investments to boost the brand’s perceived profitability and success.
But while shareholders do gain partial ownership and expect financial returns, an increase in buyers doesn’t always mean a stock will rise. Sometimes, even with popularity, the price can stay flat or even drop. So, this ad feels like a dog whistle to conservative male investors, which is confusing, considering men have never been American Eagle’s main customers.
Older men (35+) typically don’t resonate with the brand’s aesthetic, and young men tend to buy fewer clothes in general. But this ad runs deeper than just the male gaze or patriarchy; it feels like a calculated move to appeal to white supremacist men. If that’s true, it’s disturbing. It shows how far brands are willing to go, using coded language and aesthetics to draw attention, spark controversy, and chase profit, all under the guise of being “edgy” or “mischievous.”
But it didn’t work. JP Morgan actually downgraded American Eagle Outfitters, citing poor sales, especially in seasonal items like shorts and swimwear. The company’s profits are shrinking due to heavy discounting, tariffs, and ballooning advertising costs. Their forecast is dim, and American Eagle is expected to earn less than what most analysts predicted, not just this year, but for the foreseeable future. With no growth on the horizon and no strong recovery plan, JP Morgan believes the brand’s stock is likely to lose value and isn’t worth the investment right now.
Feedback for American Eagle
This whole campaign is a complete flop and should be their wake-up call. [ They have deleted some of the campaign videos on the internet after backlash broke out.]
First, AE needs cultural leadership in the room to move away from dated, exclusive beauty standards. They need to serve the interests of young women, not conservative older men, who are their main customers. American Eagle needs to stop catering to people who don’t even wear its clothes.
Second, AE needs to stop betraying its customers. American Eagle does need to have to lean into bizarre, regressive rhetoric just to seem provocative. Their messaging can be about inclusion, and they can sell women real women’s jeans that aren’t designed with the male gaze in mind. American Eagle doesn’t have to chase clout and instead should start rebuilding trust.
And lastly, AE needs to stop being racist. There is absolutely no need to continue acting like a brand stuck in a colonial mindset, where whiteness is centered, and everyone else is erased or exoticized. Beauty is not one-size-fits-all, and it's time to recognize that.
In the end, this American Eagle ad says a lot more than the brand probably intended. It not only reflects exactly where we are politically and culturally, but also how major fashion corporations still lean on racist, outdated, and sexist tropes to push product, and hope no one notices. But we did.
By centering features like blue eyes, blonde hair, and a very specific kind of body, this American Eagle ad quietly reinforces the same harmful beauty standards that have historically excluded people of color. It was never just about who’s in the ad; it’s about what the ad says, and what it doesn’t.
So yeah, they’re not just selling ill-fitting fast fashion denim jeans, they’re selling outdated narratives.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Do you agree, disagree, or see something I missed?
XOXO,
Elle