“Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle Jeans Ad Isn’t the Real Crisis — Our 2.5 Million Reactions to It Are”

The campaign featured Sweeney in a pair of jeans, accompanied by the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” A harmless pun, right? Jeans, genes — you get it. But the internet quickly found a rabbit hole to spiral into. In one of the now-pulled ads, Sweeney deadpans to the camera, “My body’s composition is determined by my genes,” and gives a cheeky wink — yes, she meant the pants and the DNA. But hey, where’s the lie? The jeans fit perfectly. And she is beautiful.

It didn’t take long for things to spiral. Critics, largely from the American liberal Left, claimed the ad was pushing White supremacist ideas, reading the “genes” pun as a wink at racial purity. Some went as far as calling it Nazi propaganda.

Conservatives quickly hit back. American media personality Megyn Kelly called the backlash absurd, accusing the “lunatic Left” of trying to cancel a woman for wearing jeans. J D Vance mocked the idea that finding Sweeney attractive now makes someone a Nazi. Even The Late Show host Stephen Colbert, not one to mince his words, joked that just maybe, people were overreacting.
They were.
The whole thing exploded so fast, American Eagle’s stock jumped 19 per cent in pre-market trading. Sweeney was instantly crowned a “meme stock icon”. That says a lot, not just about her celebrity power, but about how tangled culture, outrage, and finance have become.
Today, financial analysts don’t just treat controversies as PR crises — they see them as trading signals. In this case, a series of ads dropped, shares spiked, and speculators cashed in.

Let’s be real: This isn’t even Sweeney’s most eyebrow-raising campaign. A few months ago, she fronted an ad for Dr Squatch soap called Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss — supposedly made with water from her actual bath. Before that? A cheeky promo for a bar named Morning Wood. No outrage.

In fact, Sweeney’s campaign feels almost quaint compared to Brooke Shields’ 1980 Calvin Klein ad. The one where the then 15-year-old famously said, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.” That sparked real public outrage and justifiably so because it crossed ethical lines by sexualising a minor. But Sweeney is not 15. She’s a grown woman doing a denim ad with a bad pun. There’s no hidden agenda here, just a joke that’s barely clever. If anything, it’s dorky. Over analysing it is not only a reach, it’s a waste of critical thought.

The Summer I Turned Pretty actor Gavin Casalegno did a similar Dunkin’ Donuts’ ad. He said: “This tan? Genetics. Just got my colour analysis back. Guess what? Golden Summer.” While there has been outrage around this ad too, it is nowhere near the number of eyeballs Sweeney’s campaign has drawn. In Casalegno’s case, it seems it’s just a hot guy doing hot-guy things.

At the end of the day, we have dissected a series of 30-second ads like they are a leaked manifesto. Meanwhile, real crises rage on like famine, war, displacement, systemic oppression. The world is on fire, and we’re debating denim.

In a time where so many are desperate to be heard — from conflict zones to hunger zones — we’re burning outrage capital on a celebrity ad. Not because it truly harmed anyone, but because it trended. Because it was easy. Because outrage is now a reflex. And let’s be honest, because it pays. A viral takedown gets clicks. The more extreme the outrage, the better the engagement. We’re not just reacting anymore, we’re performing. Sometimes, it’s less about justice, more about the algorithm.

Maybe that sounds naive. But if your biggest outrage this week is over a series of denim ads, it might be time to look inward. When jeans spark more fury than war, hunger, or human suffering, the problem isn’t the ad, it’s us. So sure, Sweeney looked stunning. The wordplay was a bit much. And yes, we all could have just kept scrolling. It wasn’t that deep. And the fact that it became this deep? That might be the most disturbing part of all.

anupama.yadav@indianexpress.com