Symbol of culture wars after viral ads

Casual denim faced some serious charges in 2025 as a hugely viral American Eagle jeans ad was variously labelled Nazi, MAGA — “Make America great again” being US President Donald Trump’s pet slogan — and a slam dunk against woke marketing.

- Carmen Sin

The fractious campaign, launched in July and taglined “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans”, stars the American actress in a series of videos.

In one, the camera pans over a supine Sweeney squirming into her pants as she delivers a crash course in Mendelian genetics: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.” Wink, wink.

Another video shows Sweeney sticking a campaign poster to a billboard. To hammer in the pun, the word “genes” is crossed out on the poster and corrected to “jeans”.

The whiff of eugenics sustained a cottage industry of online discourse, also known as zingy tweets and Substack think pieces, for weeks. Critics cried “pure aryan race bulls***", defenders gloated at the "woke left's" paranoia.