Sydney Sweeney Is Great. The Meltdown Over Those American Eagle Ads Is Even Greater.
If you’ve not been under a rock in the past week you’ve likely seen the debut – and reaction – of the greatest advertising campaign of the 21st century.
It’s the American Eagle Outfitters campaign featuring actress and model Sydney Sweeney.
There’s another spot she’s in which is even more striking…
The company’s stock is skyrocketing, and sales are exploding.
Are these ads pornographic? No. Are they obscene? No.
Can you tell that Sydney Sweeney has a great body in them? Yes.
They’re a celebration of the fact she’s a beautiful, healthy and desirable young woman who doesn’t mind the male gaze – and in fact desires it. But not in a vulgar way. The ads are playful, as the play on “jeans” and “genes” is unmistakable and even a bit corny. Other than the fact she’s not wearing shoes, no aspect of how she’s dressed in these ads is inappropriate.
But she’s sexy, and American Eagle is taking a very conventional approach to selling apparel – which is that you put your stuff on a beautiful woman and send a message to your female customers that they might capture some of that if they buy and wear your offerings.
That’s old as time. It’s anything but outrageous.
Except it apparently is.
I’m not just cherry-picking the freaks. This was literally everywhere.
I’m sure our readers are well-versed in the concept of “earned media,” which is another way of saying “going viral.” American Eagle, by generating the outrage of a collection of joyless, unhinged and conspicuously unattractive people, the vast majority of which are women most men would have little to no interest in, has turned the critics into a force multiplier for the campaign.
It’s a runaway, smashing success.
And it indicates that our culture is healing.
For the last 10 years or so you couldn’t run ads like this. Madison Avenue was too busy pushing idiocy like “body positivity” and “inclusiveness.” Victoria’s Secret had morbidly obese underwear models. There were transvestite men in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. The advertising industry was pushing woke sensibilities on a disgusted and increasingly demoralized public.
And what did that get them? It produced Donald Trump’s political comeback and the revolution we saw last November.
Now Trump is demanding the Commanders and Guardians become the Redskins and Indians. There’s a Happy Gilmore sequel which is unquestionably anti-woke (watch it and you’ll agree) sitting atop Netflix’s popularity charts. Wokeness is in full retreat.
The reaction of the woke – the increasingly violent rhetoric, the nonstop F-bombing of people who don’t agree with them, the misbehavior in the streets – is only justifying the public’s rejection of their philosophy.
The backlash has begun.
It’s pretty clear that somebody at American Eagle saw this coming and decided to ride that wave. Casting Sweeney as the face of the campaign – she’s already roundly hated by the woke because of her All-American Girl persona and her refusal to submit to their pieties – was a stroke of genius BECAUSE of how unjustifiably controversial she already is.
It’s almost a political campaign. It’s much more a cultural campaign than simply a chance to sell jeans. And American Eagle has now positioned itself as the leading edge of the cultural overturn currently happening across America.
We’ll look back on this as one of the most successful advertising campaigns in American history. It’s not so much that Sydney Sweeney has changed America as that American Eagle has made her the face of that change.
