Born in the USA: Is American Eagle really using whiteness to sell jeans? | Fashion

American Eagle is a US-founded trend model that sells denims, shrunken “child” T-shirts and cropped sweatshirts to predominantly tween and teenage women. On TikTok, customers gush about their garments in outfit-of-the-day posts or procuring hauls. This week, nevertheless, the model discovered itself dealing with backlash over its new marketing campaign, starring the 27-year-old White Lotus and Euphoria actor Sydney Sweeney, during which critics are alleging American Eagle makes use of the language of eugenics to attempt to promote denim.The marketing campaign depicts Sweeney in a denim shirt and saggy denims provocatively posing as a male voice says: “Sydney Sweeney has nice denims.” In a single now-viral clip, Sweeney is filmed pasting a marketing campaign poster on to a billboard. The poster’s textual content reads “Sydney Sweeney has nice genes denims”. In one other video that has since been faraway from American Eagle’s social media channels, Sweeney, who has blond hair and blue eyes, says: “Genes are handed down from dad and mom to offspring, typically figuring out traits like hair color, persona, and even eye color. My denims are blue.”Critics had been fast to level out the implications of the advert’s wordplay. In a single video that has had greater than 3m views, a TikTok person in contrast it to “fascist propaganda,” including: “a blonde haired, blue-eyed white lady is speaking about her good genes, like, that’s Nazi propaganda”. On the model’s personal channels, customers are battling it out within the feedback part. “It’s giving ‘Delicate 1930’s Germany’,” reads one. One other individual posted: “The woke crowd wants to depart the room.” Even the US senator Ted Cruz has weighed in. Reposting a information story on X, he commented: “Wow. Now the loopy Left has come out towards lovely girls. I’m certain that can ballot nicely …”In response to Sophie Gilbert, a employees author on the Atlantic and writer of the guide Woman on Woman which explores how popular culture is formed by misogyny: “The slogan ‘Sydney Sweeney has good denims’ clearly winks on the obsession with eugenics that’s so prevalent among the many trendy proper.” Dr Sarah Cefai, a senior lecturer in gender and cultural research at Goldsmiths, College of London, agrees. “Actually, what had been they pondering, {that a} white supremacist fantasy has permission to be aired so conspicuously?”Aria Halliday, an affiliate professor in gender and girls’s research, African American and Africana research and writer of Purchase Black: How Black Girls Reworked US Pop Tradition, isn’t shocked by the advert. In recent times, she says, “we have now seen an inflow of media reasserting the fantastic thing about skinny, white, blond, and blue-eyed individuals,” with many manufacturers “invested in re-presenting the wholesomeness and sanctity of conservative white values.”Critics have additionally zeroed in on the marketing campaign’s give attention to Sweeney’s physique. In a single clip the digicam zooms in on the actor’s breasts – lingering in a means that Gilbert sees as “leering and unapologetic” – as Sweeney says: “My physique’s composition is decided by my denims.” The digicam then cuts again to Sweeney’s face as she shouts: “Hey, eyes up right here!” For Cefai, “its sexualisation of the viewer through its voyeurism exposes western sexism as a racialised fantasy of whiteness”. American Eagle had been approached for remark by the Guardian however didn’t reply.Youth sells … Brooke Shields in 1980, aged 15, in an advert for Calvin Klein. {Photograph}: Calvin KleinFashion campaigns are infamous for purposefully sparking controversy, however the denim style is a very seedy seam. In a Nineteen Eighties Calvin Klein marketing campaign, a 15-year-old Brooke Shields mused: “You already know what will get between me and my Calvin’s? Nothing.” In 1995, one other Calvin Klein advert featured fashions together with Kate Moss being filmed in a basement as they undid the highest button of their denims and had been requested: “Are you nervous?” It was criticised for alluding to baby exploitation.The American Eagle marketing campaign comes at a time when the US is witnessing a cultural shift centering whiteness in addition to extra conservative gender roles, whereas the Maga motion has been linked with selling a “comfortable eugenics” mind-set. In 2025, there are new elements reinforcing previous stereotypes. For Halliday, the rise of GLP-1 drugs for weight reduction and the report excessive unemployment of Black girls within the US all feed right into a wider cultural shift that’s “about recentering whiteness as what America is and who Individuals appear like.”Some trend imagery is reflecting this wider regression. The blacklisted photographer Terry Richardson is taking pictures for magazines and types once more, whereas Dov Charney, whose position as CEO of American Attire was terminated after allegations of sexual misconduct, is now making content material for his new model that resembles the closely sexualised noughties model of his former model’s promoting.For American Eagle, a model whose greatest demographic is 15- to 25-year-old females, to tailor their marketing campaign to the male gaze appears retrograde, if not downright creepy. Nonetheless, Jane Cunningham, co-author of Brandsplaining: Why Advertising and marketing is (Nonetheless) Sexist and Repair It, says many gen Z-ers who’re fed a “hypersexualised visible food plan” on social media might purchase into the technique. “Their angle could also be that they’re ‘proudly owning’ their sexuality by being overtly sexual in the best way they current,” she says, pointing to the pop star Sabrina Carpenter as one other instance of somebody who has additionally been accused of catering to the heterosexual male gaze.skip previous e-newsletter promotionSign as much as Vogue StatementStyle, with substance: what’s actually trending this week, a roundup of the most effective trend journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solvedPrivacy Discover: Newsletters might comprise data about charities, on-line adverts, and content material funded by exterior events. For extra info see our Privateness Coverage. We use Google reCaptcha to guard our web site and the Google Privateness Coverage and Phrases of Service apply.after e-newsletter promotionHalliday says that whereas “Black women are hardly ever the target market for adverts,” some should still be curious to attempt the denims: “the will to be perceived as lovely is difficult to disregard,” she says.Many gen Z-ers might not have skilled this style of promoting, or “intentional provocation as branding technique”, earlier than, says Gilbert, for whom the marketing campaign additionally reminds her of 90s Wonderbra adverts with their “Hi there Boys” slogan. However possibly they’ll come to see by it. They’re “extraordinarily savvy as shoppers”, she factors out. “They’ve the form of language and experience when it comes to deconstructing media that I couldn’t have dreamed of utilising as a teen throughout the Nineteen Nineties. They usually know when somebody is making an attempt to play them, which appears to be occurring right here.She provides: “All of it feels prefer it was cooked up in a convention room to impress most controversy and most outrage, and to get most consideration.” And it appears – within the enterprise sense no less than – to be working. Because the marketing campaign launched, American Eagle’s inventory has shot up virtually 18%.To learn the whole model of this article – full with this week’s trending subjects in The Measure – subscribe to obtain Vogue Assertion in your inbox each Thursday.