'You have to ruffle feathers' The long history of controversial jeans adverts

There aren't many advertising campaigns that elicit responses from the US president and vice-president, the senator Ted Cruz and the rappers Doja Cat and Lizzo.

- Ellie Violet Bramley

But the Euphoria actor Sydney Sweeney's recent ad for American Eagle denim has done just that.

Critics have interpreted the campaign - which features the tagline "Sydney Sweeney has great genes" with the word genes then replaced by "jeans" - as promoting eugenics; defenders have taken the complaints as evidence of so-called "woke" culture in the extreme.

Scrutinising it has taken on the trappings of a cottage industry.

"Clocking in for my shift at the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle opinion factory," the journalist Hunter Harris wrote on her Substack.

But it is just the latest of a long line of provocative jeans adverts, some obviously controversial or offensive, others more open to interpretation.

A 1973 campaign from Jesus Jeans that featured the slogan "you shall have no other jeans before" me" sparked controversy for its mixing of religion and advertising.

The Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini even wrote an essay on the subject, in which he said the slogan "punishes the church for its pact with the devil".