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The Sidney Sweeney commercial.
AKA, why nutpicking is not a valid defense. And probably hasn't been in a while.
The Sidney Sweeny "Good Jeans" commercial has gone viral as many here probably know. Of course, with a commercial featuring a conventionally attractive white woman making a double entendre about how she is hot and wears cool pants was sure to be. But, perhaps more than the merits of the original commercial, the backlash to the commercial has vaulted it into an even higher tier of virility than even the most optimistic American Eagle marketers could have projected.
Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc. So, just about everything normally happening on the internet. Right? Well, sure there is your token tic tok users making such accusations. The usual suspects like Salon.com immediately seized upon this narrative, along with someone who is apparently famous called Doja Cat. And MSNBC to complete the set of entities that pick up anything they can regarding online outrage.
But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring. ABC especially went deep with Good Morning America bringing on an "expert" to rail against the ad as "Nazi Propaganda" (the host's words), "The American Eugenics Movement" and "White Supremacism" (the expert's words).
Where does this leave us? For me its another data point that the accusation of "nutpicking" whenever one of these woke controversies emerges is kinda a bad faith argument to make. People who see these things aren't nutpicking, they are being presented with a lot of nuts, often in prominent positions or positions of power. This particular controversy had me feeling sympathetic cringe on behalf of the reasonable center-leftists. But then I fisk that feeling and have to ask when they are actually going to police their crazies the way the right's mainstream does. Candace Owens employment status at the Daily Wire is terminated. Tucker Carlson's status at Fox is terminated. The guys who got fired at NPR and the NYT? For NPR its the guy who was saying they were too biased towards the left. For the Times, its the guys who let a Senator write a fairly bland Op-Ed about how to police riots.
As for the politicians, most have seemingly stayed away. I doubt many will answer any questions on this directly (Democrats I mean, obviously many Republicans have already made hay with yet another unforced error by the left's activist class). The reason is clear, they know the right answer, particularly for most general elections, is to laugh at the activists and "nuts" on things like this. But they cannot actually seem to bring themselves to actually express that in public. The nuts are their staffers and their boots on the ground and so it seems keeping them happy is more important than being able to say, "sometimes its just a cute girl making a pun". I don't know what the math on this actually is, but there it is. You are what you do, and this is no longer nutpicking, its mainstream. I dont know if nutpicking was ever valid, but I don't think it can reasonably be said to still be so for this category of things.
My guess, for whatever it's worth, is that it's not just a pun. I don't think for a second that AE is trying to usher in a new age of white supremacy but I feel they were being deliberately provocative because they figured this blowing up would be good for them. They're probably right - I wouldn't be surprised if a fair few people who previously wouldn't have thought twice about the ad now decide to buy there just to annoy the scolds.
Absolutely.
I remember an article about A&F intentionally trying to be “exclusionary.” Ah, that checks out: it was a Netflix exposé.
The models, the hiring for storefronts, it was all very specific. And why wouldn’t it be? Fashion gets a lot of mileage out of that. It worked really well for them.
This had to be intentional at some level.
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bulllllshittt.
https://instagram.com/reel/DAkHtzmIVUA/?hl=en
Here's a JC Penny ad from less than 1 year ago making the exact same 'pun'. You can't tell me that making this pun while happening to also be white is a knowing dog whistle.
https://instagram.com/reel/C2-nqvHsMi0/ Here's express doing it 1.5 years ago.
It's ok to be white. It really is ok to be white.
The whole point of that meme is on display right here. It's only a double-entendre because the left MAKES it so. 'You are not allowed to uncontroversially be white' is not an acceptable equilibrium.
I didn't.
You said you think they’re being deliberately provocative.
I can show countless examples of the fact that jeans makers make this pun on a regular basis. Your post suggests that making the pun, while also being white is deliberately provocative. Bullshit.
The picked a hot it girl, and made the same tired cliche wordplay every jeans manufacturer makes on repeat. The spotlight here is completely fabricated and it would have been removed with the same shrug this dumb line gets every other time
I will steelman that. If "intentionally provocative" implies they were doing something illicit or unsavory, (i.e., "dogwhistling white supremacy") no, they weren't. However, the current environment, the year of our lord 2025, when woke is very much not dead, I would be astonished if the marketing team did not fully anticipate that having a hot blue-eyed blonde woman talking about her "good genes" and being unapologetically sexy (in the most traditional, "conventionally attractive" as they say, way) and white, would generate Discourse.
In other words, they knew a bunch of woke critics would flip their shit exactly as they are doing. Maybe they didn't bank on quite such a strong (and profitable!) reaction, but I'll bet they were totally pricing in attacks on the pretty white lady implying that it's good to be pretty, and probably some claims that they were pushing eugenics and Nazi imagery as well. So in that sense, that they were counting on (and possibly banking on) some unhinged reactions to generate a little controversy, yes, they were being intentionally provocative.
(And the best sexy ads are provocative. The famous Brooke Shields ad generated Discourse back in the day, not because she was hot and white, but because she was fifteen. They knew what they were doing then too.)
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Agreed. This is not a spur of the moment thing. Some marketing firm decided that "White woman has great genes/jeans" was an acceptable pun to run a big ad campaign on.
This is about as innocent as anything Cartman has ever said, which is not at all innocent.
They were deliberately courting controversy. I am not sure that they will come out ahead, though.
If they were the 40th largest jeans vendor in the US, they would probably come out ahead. Sure, they would alienate 20% of their customer base, but they might also entice 1% to buy their jeans specifically because they made the wokes cry.
However, American Eagle is the fifth biggest jeans brand in the US (according to some shitty online list I found). 20% who will not buy their products anymore might hurt them quite a bit. For what it's worth, NYSE:AEO did not make any big moves.
Personally, I would not have run the ads in their shoes. Woke is not so dead that I would jump on its corpse, and the outraged 20% will probably have longer memories than the celebrating 30% (of whom only a small fraction might actually buy their jeans).
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