The great denim advertising battle of 2025.

Article by Syn Dika

Graphic by Hayden Carkner

Have you ever seen an ad that makes you upset?

 I’m talking about the rightly controversial American Eagle ad featuring Sydney Sweeney that came out this year. Coming from someone who was once told I “read too much into things,” I went down the rabbit hole of the actual ad campaign they decided to go with, and initially I thought I was doing just that. See, when searching for the ad on YouTube, there is only one result. The video is fine for the most part, except for making me really uncomfortable with how much she thought I wanted American Eagle jeans, and I thought, “Wait? Was that all?” 

This was my first time really diving into it besides hearing people get upset about it, so when the only vaguely problematic statement was the tagline reading “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” I thought this would be a slightly different piece. But by golly, was I wrong. 

Turns out this ad campaign was primarily focused on short-form content, like on TikTok or Instagram reels, if you’re into that. So once I watched all six of those ads, I definitely understood what people meant. While the latter four ads are relatively the same as the YouTube video, the first two are the real meat and potatoes of this controversy. They feel like a dog whistle, specifically for the idea of eugenics. 

In the first ad they posted, Sweeney was told to show her hands and figure for the fake audition, which, on its own, is really weird when combined with their interesting tagline choice, but they further cement this feeling in their second ad, where a physical advertisement of Sweeney is shown with text stating, “Sydney Sweeney has good genes”. Shortly after, Sweeney walks in front of the word “genes,” and it’s crossed out, and replaced with “jeans.” Watching this felt less like a dog whistle and more like a train whistle. I was just floored. Apparently, so was GAP. Roughly a month after the Sydney Sweeney campaign released, they launched their ‘Better In Denim” campaign, featuring girl group Katseye alongside an extremely diverse group of people, dancing to the song Milkshake by Kelis. Not only did the ad not make me physically uncomfortable to watch, but it was also made with a lot of care and artistry versus the minimal and “up close” style of Sweeny’s ads. Their ads go deeper as well, featuring not only a behind-the-scenes of the music video, where their emphasis on diversity and the beauty of it is explained clearly by choreographer Robbie Blue, but also 32 short-form videos. Not only did they put more effort, care, and thought into the ad, but they BLEW American Eagle out of the water. A pinch of eugenics being drowned out by early 2000s music, the only way it should, cause everyone can dance to that. So, as a final word, if someone says “It isn’t that deep,” unless you’re talking about UNO, yes, it is.