Sydney Sweeney denim jeans ad sparks polarising online divide, University of Adelaide’s Dr Amelie Burgess says it reflects the current sociopolitical climate

It’s the American Eagle jeans campaign dividing the internet but marketing experts say there’s a reason people can’t keep their eyes off Sydney Sweeney.

Sydney Sweeney is front and centre of political discourse yet again, and this time it’s over denim.

A new advertisement campaign by American Eagle features Sweeney in blue jeans, saying “My body’s composition is determined by my genes. Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour”.

The commercial ends with the tagline, ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans’ with the interchangeable wordplay of ‘jeans’ and ‘genes’.

The ad campaign, which has since been removed from the internet, has exposed an online political tug of war — with some arguing that it perpetuates harmful norms, while others see it as a clever jab at ‘woke culture’.

A new ad for American Eagle jeans featuring actress Sydney Sweeney used a play on words, with some claiming it is full-on Nazi propaganda. Picture: American Eagle

“Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle promoting eugenics and pushing the Aryan race Nazi propaganda was not in my 2025 bingo card,” an X user said.

Another said “getting a blue eyed, blonde, white woman and focusing your campaign around her having perfect genetics. Feels weird, especially considering the current state of America”.

Meanwhile one user wrote, “You are not only making jeans hot again but you’re ushering in the end of woke-ness and the return of normalcy.”

“People calling Sydney Sweeney and this ad ‘Fascist’ and a ‘Nazi’ ain’t gonna do nothing because woke is dead. It’s just a hot girl in jeans! America is healing”, another X post read.

University of Adelaide senior marketing lecturer Dr Amelie Burgess, said the mixed reactions were based on a “degree of belief incongruence” between consumers.

“Some people are saying that they think that it’s really misogynistic and it’s setting women back. Some people are saying that they think that it’s more racially charged towards people of colour and then others are saying that they think that it’s really anti-Semitic,” she said.

“All three of those things can be subjectively true to consumer audiences but we also know that they are very much popular or overly spoken about in the current sociopolitical climate.

“They’re very relevant and they’re very salient.”

Sweeney has been no stranger to scrutiny, copping disapproval for the MAGA hats worn at her mother’s birthday party or her ‘male-gazey’ SNL appearances, which Dr Burgess said potentially contributed to the explosive online backlash.

“There’s probably a bit more of an eagle eye on her as a celebrity brand at the moment which is why it’s likely gone so rogue or really blown up on social media because she’s at the tip of everybody’s tongues,” she said.

The one ad campaign has since been removed from social channels by American Eagle. Picture: American Eagle

Moreover the campaign reflects the brand’s “deliberate efforts to represent inclusivity”, according to Dr Burgess.

“For an ad to not be discriminatory or offensive your visual and non-visual cues have to work together, and what we’re seeing here is that they’re not,” she said “you’ve got the non-visual cue in terms of those wordplay with the genes and the jeans is already a little bit risky, and then they’ve paired that with the visual cue of Sydney Sweeney who very much aligns with this stereotypical idealised beauty standard — which has been obviously linked to harmful eugenic ideology about genetic superiority”.

There’s no telling if the denim debacle was intentional, but Dr Burgess emphasised brands have a “better understanding of impact over intent to do better for next time”.