Pretty White Girl Causes Panic

American Eagle & the Drama Over Sydney Sweeney’s Genes/Jeans

American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) just dropped their latest campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney, and the internet is having a collective meltdown.

The ads show the blonde actress doing quintessentially Americana things—leaning over the hood of a white Mustang, lounging with a German shepherd puppy, buttoning up oversized jeans—looking like exactly what you'd expect from a clothing brand trying to sell denim to young Americans.

Imagine the outrage.

It didn’t help that the campaign—titled “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” a wink at her “great genes”—was plastered across storefronts, billboards, and Instagram. Here’s one of those images.

Source: X

And then there’s the video ad where Sweeney herself leans into the whole genes/jeans wordplay. (Transcript snippet underneath.)

Sydney Sweeney: Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.

The backlash has been as predictable as it has been irrational.

Social media activists, overpaid woke journalists, and race hustlers immediately lost their minds, linking it to white supremacy and eugenics instead of recognizing it for what it obviously was: a beautiful young actress who happens to have been blessed in more than one department promoting denim jeans.

X exploded with whines about American Eagle "going backwards" and "abandoning diversity." One viral thread accused the company of "weaponizing whiteness" by featuring Sweeney. Another claimed the ad represents a "dangerous return to exclusionary beauty standards."

Legacy media, not to be outdone, came out with headlines like the one below—warning us about an “unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness” and calling Sweeney’s ad campaign “ugly and startling.”

Source: MSNBC

Here’s the link in case you think I’m exaggerating. The piece basically argues that featuring an attractive white woman in 2025 America is some kind of fascist dog whistle.

This is all nonsense, of course. But leave it to the grievance industry to be perpetually outraged—while completely ignoring the fact that this ad is basically a rip-off of Brooke Shields’ 1980s Calvin Klein campaign, which also played on the “genes/jeans” pun.

Remember: nothing comes from nothing in advertising.

The Woke Reversal

I don’t care much about fashion or style trends, but here’s what makes this whole story interesting to me… Just a few years ago, American Eagle was running campaigns that checked every box in the progressive playbook.

Their 2019 "Real Power" campaign featured predominantly non-white models, "body-positive" messaging, and enough diversity quotas to make a DEI consultant weep with joy. They partnered with LGBTQ+ activists, promoted gender-neutral clothing lines, and made sure their Instagram looked like a United Nations assembly. Here's a peek at those glorious days of woke capitalism.

Source: X

Back then, featuring a conventionally attractive white woman would have been unthinkable. The brand was so committed to the woke aesthetic that their marketing materials looked more like sociology textbooks than fashion ads.

But something shifted. Maybe it was the Bud Light disaster that cost Anheuser-Busch billions in market value. Perhaps it was Target's Pride collection backlash that wiped out $15 billion in market cap.

We can only speculate about the exact catalyst, but what we do know is that American Eagle's recent quarterly reports tell a story that's far from rosy. After several strong years, sales have been slipping, margins are under pressure, and the company has struggled to maintain profitability.

So it appears American Eagle's executives actually looked at the numbers, weighed their market intelligence, talked to their focus groups, and realized that woke messaging has run its course. It's almost like they're prioritizing business over ideology. Revolutionary stuff, I know.

Following the Money

This brings us to the uncomfortable truth that corporate America is slowly learning: woke messaging is a luxury that only works when money is cheap and alternatives are scarce. As I've written before, woke capitalism's current retreat isn't coincidental—it perfectly aligns with the Fed's rate hiking cycle and the end of easy money.

When money get expensive and returns get scarce, companies can’t afford to alienate paying customers for a fleeting moment of activist applause on X and in HuffPost.

And guess what? American Eagle’s stock is up more than 20% since the new campaign launched.

Non-woke advertising, it turns out, actually works. Who could have predicted that featuring attractive people selling desirable products to willing customers would be good for business? Apparently not the DEI consultants who spent years convincing corporate America otherwise.

The Sydney Sweeney “great jeans” controversy is really about the death throes of an ideology that never made business sense to begin with. And so—despite the screeching from activists and race hustlers—American Eagle is being rewarded for walking away from woke orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, companies still clinging to performative activism continue to hemorrhage stock value and market share.

But here’s the million-dollar question: Will corporate boardrooms crank the woke messaging back up once the Fed inevitably returns to cheap money? I guess we won’t have to wait long to find out.

Regards,

Lau Vegys