No Matter the Intent, American Eagle and Sydney Sweeney Deserve To Face Consequences For Controversial Jeans Ad

(Emma McIntyre/WireImage/Getty Images)Sydney Sweeney attends the premiere of “Eden” during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival on September 07, 2024

While the name-calling on social media is once again revealing the worst side of the internet, neither American Eagle nor Sydney Sweeney should be immune to criticism for their controversial Genes/Jeans ad, and ultimately, they will have to pay a price for “pushing boundaries,” whether the boundaries they pushed were intended or not.

Two of my colleagues here at The Invisible Voice have already chimed in on the controversy, discussing the discourse online and explaining the dangers of the “boundaries” they pushed, as the ad has been called out by multiple scholars and political commentators (not just people looking for virality on social media) for its eugenicist undertones.

While it is obvious that the ad is a distraction from more important issues at hand, such as war between Ukraine and Russia, or genocide in Gaza, a mass-disabling event and based in itself in ethnonationalist, eugenicist sentiment, or an increasingly hostile environment for people of minorities in America, this does not mean that this situation does not deserve attention.

Though it is a stretch (that social media has become par for the course in today’s society), for chronically online folks to call Sydney Sweeney a Nazi, this does not mean that she, or American Eagle, as a major celebrity and a multi-million dollar corporation, does not deserve the backlash from the controversy they created with this ad.

While American Eagle has distanced themselves from eugenics discourse in the wake of this backlash, talk of the importance of a genetic hierarchy has been a right-wing talking point for generations, and Eugenics was a term coined in 1883 by Francis Galton. It was influenced by Darwinism and is defined by Britannica as “the selection of desired heritable characteristics to improve future generations, typically in humans.” Galton explicitly advocated for a system that meant that “more suitable races or strains of blood” had a better chance of surviving.

The reason Sydney Sweeney is being called a Nazi and that American Eagle is being accused of elevating Nazi propaganda is because eugenics was used as a basis for Adolf Hitler’s plan to exterminate Jewish people during World War II. Coupled with the fact that Sweeney is a registered Republican, people are understandably up in arms about this development, especially given the fact that the actress was at her mother’s birthday party, where guests wore MAGA hats. Sweeney publicly distanced herself from the president in the wake of that affair, but it has arisen once more, given the ad’s obvious dive into genetics.  While my colleague raised a point that the CEO of AE is Jewish, it is important to note that not everyone who believes in eugenics is a Nazi.

We have a right-wing, increasingly authoritarian regime in power in America, whose leader, as well as getting involved in the controversy, has in the past accused Barack Obama of not being American (a eugenicist talking point, it must be added). Trump has always wanted to stoke fire in his base to keep himself positioned as the leader of the new Republican party. It is no surprise to those who pay attention that a corporation that cares most importantly about its bottom line creates controversy to make a splash on social media and drive attention to its brand, regardless of whether it is positive or negative.

This is not new, nor is it the first time a company has come under fire for eugenicist messaging, as my other colleague spoke of in her article. However, in the case of Calvin Klein, the company displayed that they had learned from the backlash, launching a 2014 campaign under #MyCalvins, which became a phenomenon and grew to eventually celebrate people of different backgrounds, complexions, and ethnicities.

Had American Eagle focus-grouped this idea, taken stock of what people of different walks of life had to say about the ad, and retooled the campaign to include a more diverse cast, instead of a just blonde-haired, blue-eyed actress who, admittedly, many already over-sexualized, perhaps their hand-waving could hold more weight in the current political climate we find ourselves in.

This is not just “woke conspiracy and nonsense”, nor is it just online discourse. The backlash is due to something very real and very dangerous, and regardless of which boundaries the campaign looked to push, they have pushed the wrong ones.

While eugenics is the basis for racist, xenophobic, ethnonationalist views, it also has roots in a lot of disability discourse. There is significant evidence to point towards most of what we have to deal with daily being based on eugenics

Everything from public perception, medical malpractice such as the belief that we do not understand our bodies well enough to tell doctors about the symptoms of our diagnoses, to casual ableism, and even COVID response, where governments allowed for the relaxation of social distancing and mask mandates so that we could “get back to normal” which put immuno-compromised people at risk, have been linked to eugenics, and an overall belief that disabled people’s lives matter less because our lives are seen as less fulfilling than our abled counterparts.

Activist and writer Imani Barbarin has been a particular voice I have listened to when it comes to the place that eugenics has in how we are perceived in daily life. As much as many may claim that the backlash that this campaign led to was generated and is contained solely on social media for virality and views, many on social media accuse the disabled community of faking or being in it for the money.

Again, it is not a new revelation that social media can be a horrible place to gauge opinions, but in 2025, when most of the “legs” of an ad campaign are on social media and the internet at large, the question must be asked what American Eagle expected from doing an ad campaign championing the importance of genes with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, conventionally attractive, able-bodied woman at its center.

In conclusion, I do not believe that Sydney Sweeney is an armband-wearing, straight-arm saluting Nazi. I do not know her. I also believe that social media will take just about anything and contort it in whatever way they want to fit a narrative.  Additionally, however, I believe American Eagle knew what they were doing, knew the exact boundaries they were pushing, as many successful marketing campaigns feature double entendres or clever euphemisms, and used that to their advantage to get people talking about their company, whether the discourse was positive or negative, and are unhappy that they are getting more backlash than they expected.

Unfortunately for them, they must deal with that backlash whether they like it or not, because they chose to go with that particular narrative in the campaign, and public perception comes with consequences.