Good Jeans, Bad Taste: Why Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle Campaign Crossed a Line

There is nothing new about selling denim through sex appeal. From Brooke Shields in the eighties to endless low rise campaigns in the 2000s, the blueprint is familiar: a woman, a camera, and the suggestion that buying a pair of jeans might also buy you her confidence, her cool, her desirability. But something about American Eagle’s latest campaign with Sydney Sweeney feels harder to brush off. It is not simply that the camera lingers; it is how it lingers. Not simply that the pun, “good genes,” is tired; it is where that pun lands. Blonde, blue eyed, wide eyed: the all American beauty canon, now animated through a new face but an old idea.

Beneath the glossy lighting and nostalgic styling lies something more unsettling. A tension between what is being advertised and what is being implied. The product is women’s clothing. The pitch, it seems, is a woman herself. And when that woman’s image is wrapped in a slogan that so casually invokes biology, “good genes” as beauty, as branding, as birthright, it begins to echo a far older, far darker fantasy. One where whiteness is quietly upheld as ideal, and where desirability slips too easily into the language of eugenics.

The Campaign That Knew Exactly What It Was Doing

The camera pans to her chest. Then, as if on cue, Sydney Sweeney delivers the line: “Eyes up here.” Her tone is playful; her gaze lands somewhere between mockery and performance. On the surface, it is a moment of self-awareness, a knowing wink at the viewer. Yet the effect is anything but subtle.

Across social media and billboards, the slogan blares in bold: Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans. The wordplay is obvious and deliberately so. A pun stitched together from the oldest advertising blueprint in the book: if in doubt, sell sex. Or at least the suggestion of it.

American Eagle’s Fall 2025 campaign is not just selling denim. It is selling aesthetic seduction in the guise of irony. The poses are languid, the shirt unbuttoned just enough. There is a particular kind of performance happening here; the blonde bombshell pretending she is in on the joke while still delivering the exact image the joke relies on. It gestures at parody, yet lands as pure compliance.

There is a discomfort that many have quietly expressed, not because a woman is owning her sexuality, but because the whole thing feels like a costume. One designed to look like empowerment while serving a gaze that is not hers. For a campaign ostensibly aimed at young women, it feels strangely calibrated for someone else’s pleasure.

So the question remains: is it selling women’s clothing or a woman? Is this an invitation to shop for jeans, or an image tailored entirely for the male gaze?

From Genes to Jeans: A Lineage of Selling Girlhood

Before Sydney Sweeney arched a brow and whispered “eyes up here,” another teenage girl made denim history. In 1980, a fourteen-year-old Brooke Shields appeared in Calvin Klein’s now infamous campaign. Her hair was glossy, her smile knowing.

The tagline was simple: “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

It was provocative. It was iconic. And it was rightly condemned. Yet the campaign worked precisely because it blurred the line between suggestion and scandal. It turned a girl into a cultural object, then sold that object as fashion.

The pun has been circulating ever since. Good jeans. Good genes. Either way, the subtext stays the same: she is desirable, and you can wear it too.

Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign is not a replica of the Shields original, but it nods to it, knowingly. The blonde beauty, the arch humour, the adolescent fantasy dressed in all-American denim is less a throwback than a reboot.

Sweeney is no teenager. She enters this lineage as an adult, presumably with agency. Yet the echoes of that earlier campaign still ring uncomfortably loud.

As Jean Kilbourne once observed, “advertising often turns a human being into a thing, and once you do that, there’s always a risk of violence.” In this context, the campaign feels less clever than complicit.

And just like before, the woman becomes the slogan.

Irony Is Not Liberation

There is a new trick in the advertising playbook: deliver the image, then signal that you know exactly what you are doing. Add a wink. A pun. A reference to the absurdity of it all. It creates the illusion of critique while keeping the image intact.

Sydney Sweeney saying “eyes up here” is not subversion. It is not even satire. It is the advertising equivalent of a get out of jail free card; an attempt to acknowledge the objectification before anyone else can, but the acknowledgement does not undo the image; it only protects it.

The campaign leans into irony, but irony has its limits. Women are not automatically empowered just because the performance is knowing. The male gaze is not disrupted simply because it has been made obvious. In fact, self awareness has become a kind of camouflage; a stylistic defence that makes critique feel outdated, even prudish.

What makes this particular campaign so jarring is its awareness without distance. The visual language is still built on sexual availability, the styling, the framing, the choice of model suggest a fantasy still in service of the same consumer desire. But by cloaking it in cleverness, it dares you to object. Because if you do, you have missed the joke.

And yet, for many, the joke is not landing.

Are We Buying Jeans, or the Woman Wearing Them?

Campaigns do not exist in a vacuum. American Eagle’s parent company is owned by Jay Schottenstein, a long-time Republican donor with deep ties to Donald Trump and the broader American right. His support has aligned with platforms that target reproductive rights, trans existence and racial justice. This is the quiet architecture behind the billboard; it does not always show, but it shapes what gets shown.

Sydney Sweeney is not endorsing those views. She is playing a part. But when that part is framed in close up; pale skin, blonde hair, blue eyes; while the slogan plays with “good genes,” the result is more than just tone deaf. It brushes dangerously close to a visual and verbal rhetoric that has long prized whiteness as both aspirational and superior. The discomfort lies not just in the sexualised, objectified white woman in jeans, but in the unsettling echo of eugenics that the phrase cannot quite shake.

The suggestion is subtle, but potent: that there is something inherently better in these genes. That desire can be marketed as inheritance. That beauty can be read as biology. In a political moment when conversations about race, gender, and reproductive control are under assault, this entanglement of sex, whiteness and idealised femininity feels less like nostalgia and more like regression.

The campaign invites a laugh, but it also invites a memory. Shields in the eighties. Abercrombie in the nineties. A whole century of women turned into aesthetic symbols of purity, passivity and national identity. The pun may be clever, but cleverness has never been a safeguard against ideology. It simply softens the impact.

So the discomfort lingers; not because the ad is shocking, but because it is not. Because in 2025, a sexualised white woman in jeans still feels like the safest image in fashion. Because irony is used to excuse what would not survive sincerity. And because we are expected to admire her without asking what we are really being sold.

In the end, the question remains. Is this about women’s clothing, or the woman herself?

And if the jeans are not the product; she is.