“Ripped to Shreds” is a biweekly column by Jaxon Havens about fashion politics.
What’s worse: a Canadian tuxedo or a Canadian tuxedo with no shirt underneath? Are you in support of bare nips against denim? Doesn’t that chafe?
These questions, and more, were sparked by the controversial American Eagle “great jeans” ad campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney at the end of July, 2025. One of the ads references Brook Shields’ infamous Calvin Klein campaign from the 80s and features Sweeney making a statement on genetics. Speaking like Watson and Crick’s least favorite child, she states:
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring. Often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”
The grammar and syntax beg for a rewrite, and the wordplay on genes / jeans is also nothing revolutionary. The same pun was, after all, the basis for the 80s Calvin Klein ad. In said ad, a 15-year-old Brooke Shields discussed genetics while contorting her body as she puts on a pair of jeans, which she concludes are exemplary of the “survival of the fittest.” Other ads further sexualized Shields, with her stating that “nothing” came between her Calvins. While the campaign was not unsuccessful, it was generally viewed as distasteful. In a 2021 interview with Vogue, Shields recalled how she and her mother were lambasted by paparazzi shouting “How could you!” To a young girl, this controversy was shocking. Shields herself claimed that she was too young and “naive” to understand the innuendos in the script, as reported by Emily Kirkpatrick of Vanity Fair.
American Eagle clearly intended to stir up controversy by drawing inspiration from this ad. Campaigns reliant on ragebaiting their consumer base are hardly novel for the marketing of the ready-to-wear brand, which in 2016 memorably staged the “male body positivity” campaign, #AerieMAN, as an April Fool’s joke.
What makes this ad so controversial is that it has been criticized as a eugenics dog whistle. This critique spread like wildfire across social media platforms, like X and Tiktok. NPR explained in the article, “The ad campaign that launched a thousand critiques: Sydney Sweeney’s jeans,” that this backlash is unfolding in the context of conservatives’ opposition to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Even Vice President J.D. Vance made a joke that Democrats have been “tell[ing] everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive [sic] is a Nazi.”
Critics have said the emphasis on Sweeney—white, (fake) blonde, and blue-eyed—having “great jeans (genes)” is an implicit statement of racial superiority. The distinction between genes and jeans in Sweeney’s speech is ambiguous, but American Eagle posters feature the word “genes” crossed out and replaced with “jeans.” Beyond the product itself, American Eagle thus markets the biological fantasy that comes with having the same kind of “good genes” as Sweeney.
On the other hand, those in favor of the ad have pointed out that non-white stars like Beyonce have also advertised jeans—as if Sweeney’s whiteness, decoupled from the talk about genetics, is itself being problematized by critics. This discourse falls into the unfortunate back-and-forth of many debates on identity politics today, in which racial critique falls on deaf ears and is met with a “but black people do it too!” response that never addresses the content of the initial critique. Sigh.
It is no surprise that the garment at the center of this controversy is denim. From cowboys to Bruce Springsteen, jeans have been a quintessential symbol of Americana, and inevitably have complex and troubled entanglements with race.
Looking at material histories of labor and consumption, a complex history of race is woven into the fibers of American denim. PBS’s documentary, “Riveted: The History of Jeans | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE,” explains how slaveowners in the New World forced enslaved Africans to wear harsher and coarser textiles, referred to as “slave cloth.” Denim, as a woven fabric which could be made from domestically-farmed cotton, was one such cloth—though obviously not the same denim that makes up today’s jeans. At the same time, the growth of the textile industry relied on the labor of those same enslaved people through the cultivating and harvesting of cotton and indigo–cash crops in the American south.
While the first contemporary jeans were produced in the 1870s, as can be identifiably marked by Levi Strauss & Co.’s 1873 patent, the agricultural and industrial systems in place were built by slave labor. The reappropriation of the rough textile was only accomplished as a means of fashioning a new kind of workwear that could be made available as a consumer product. Through this, jeans became a symbol of Southern pride and lifestyle. However, the insidious legacy of Black enslavement underlies its genesis.
In 2022, the Guardian reported on a pair of jeans from the 1880s that had been unearthed in a mineshaft with the words “The only kind made by white labor” stitched into them. The stitching on these jeans echoes the sentiments of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It appeals to opponents of Chinese immigrant workers who could be “taking” jobs from white Americans in jeans factories. As an American staple garment, jeans have thus also been entangled with various forms of American racism.
Today, much of the backlash from the American Eagle ad is likely related to Sweeney being a registered Republican. Her political conservatism has certainly been scrutinized before, including an incident of 2022 Twitter backlash when she was seen among “Blue Lives Matter” t-shirt-wearing guests at a family birthday party. These optics make the political messaging of the ad even more clear. In an era of anti-DEI, it is no mistake that American Eagle chose a conservative celebrity to symbolize the hot-white-girl-as-genetic-lottery message.
This brings us to a more recent viral denim ad, Gap’s “BetterinDenim” collaboration with the multinational, ethnically diverse girl group Katseye dancing to Kelis’ 2003 hit “Milkshake.” Each of them is dressed in a denim ensemble that is rigorously accessorized. The dancing is the kind of regimented and synchronous K-Pop-inspired style they are known for, displaying talent alongside the product.
Many have called this a clap back at American Eagle, but given the timelines of ad campaigns and the fact that Katseye has been a rising-star girl group for a while, it is more likely that these ads coincidentally reflect a crux in American identity politics. One is the hot “all-American” white girl of J.D. Vance’s dreams harkening to conventional beauty in an era of a social “push toward conservatism,” and the other is an international group of girls who are all beautiful, but who also all look different from each other. The ad campaign doesn’t use diversity as a buzz word, but instead showcases it through the upcoming stars of Katseye. Although the timing of the two campaigns is coincidental, it feels almost unbelievably of-the-moment. What could be more of a pushback to the dominance of American white femininity than Katseye’s gorgeous Lara Raj rocking a small bindi and gold nose ring in her denim ensemble?