A flip of blonde hair. A flash of bright blue eyes. With this grounding imagery, the camera pans slowly across her body, and then an abrupt order—“Hey! Eyes up here!” The camera sharply jerks up to encounter actress Sydney Sweeney. She smiles at the camera coquettishly: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”
This is a clip of an American Eagle ad campaign from this past summer. Their slogan, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” marketed Sweeney’s admired beauty with a pun about her “great” genes, while she wears American Eagle’s “great” jeans. Amidst an increase in immigration policing and a surge in American nationalism, Sweeney—a white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes—assumed a position as a spokesperson for great genes while using verbiage like “offspring,” which generated outcry as a possible nod to eugenics. This was especially the case when just last year President Trump suggested that undocumented immigrants have “bad genes.” And, even if not quite so extreme as to reference eugenics, many agreed that the ad campaign was, at the very least, a bit tone deaf.
Yet, it seemed that for every person criticizing the campaign, there was another scoffing at said critics, calling it all a massive overreaction. After all, why would American Eagle benefit from subliminally pushing far-right rhetoric? This is undoubtedly the scoffing stance that Vice President J.D. Vance has taken, equating the critiques of Sweeney’s “all-American” and “normal jeans ad,” direct quotes from Vance, to comparing her to a Nazi. Others took similar stances, such as USA Today writer Ingrid Jacques, who called the public outcry a “ridiculous overreaction,” and wrote that “it’s the latest example of how the left refuses to let go of their woke agenda and identity politics, which were soundly rejected in the 2024 election.”
For the past decade, companies have commonly aligned themselves with progressive ideologies, most notably through “rainbow capitalism.” As the political power of the LGBTQ+ community grew, so did their purchasing power, called “pink money.” In 2015, the global estimated LGBT Per Annum Spending Power was valued at $917 billion, according to Witeck Communications. For corporate America, this was an invaluable marketing opportunity. Throughout the 2010s, the June celebration of Pride Month was full of rainbow flags in storefronts, social media pride campaigns, and rainbow pride merch. Some notable campaigns include Nike’s long-term “Be True” campaign, Absolut’s “Out and Open,” and Target’s “Take Pride.”
Yet, in 2023, Nike didn’t release “Be True,” ending a twelve-year campaign. Target, a previous Platinum sponsor of New York City Pride, defined as an over $175,000 donor, opted to be a silent partner this year, detaching from public support of the Pride event. In 2024, the company also slashed the number of stores carrying Pride merchandise in half.
With pink money valued higher than ever, it seems that the trend of companies scaling back their Pride merchandise and support is due to intense right-wing consumer pushback that offsets the advantages of appealing to the LGBTQ+ consumer demographic. The turning point is often considered to be in 2023 when Bud Light, owned by Anheuser-Busch, launched an ad campaign featuring Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer. After the launch, Bud Light sales dropped 23 percent from the previous year. In some Southern markets, the drop was up to 40 percent. “It’s time to beat the Radical Left at their own game. Money does talk—Anheuser-Busch now understands that,” Trump crowed in response. And indeed, at the 250th anniversary of the Army parade, also coinciding with President Trump’s birthday, attendees relished the energy drink Phorm, a product of a collaboration between Trump ally Dana White and Anheuser-Busch itself.
This June, a leaked memo by the founder and CEO of BarkBox, Matt Meeker, directly demonstrates current corporate attitudes towards Pride initiatives. In this memo, Meeker says that “the current climate makes this promotion [of Pride] feel more like a political statement […] If we wouldn’t feel comfortable running a promotion centered around another politically charged symbol (like a MAGA-themed product), it’s worth asking whether this is the right moment to run this particular campaign.”
The death of rainbow capitalism is not the only spot where right-wing pushback has been manifesting. Notably, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has gone from criticizing Trump’s immigration policies and banning the President from Facebook to donating $1 million to the President’s 2025 inauguration fund and spending a cozy Thanksgiving Eve dinner together. During the company’s quarterly earnings call, Zuckerberg explicitly praised Trump, stating, “We now have a US administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning, and that will defend our values and interests abroad, and I am optimistic about the progress and innovation that this can unlock.” Companies clearly don’t care whatsoever about the values attached to whichever political stance they are aligning with: What they care about is money, and so they simply cater to the highest bidder through politicized marketing.
Those who have pushed against the claim that the American Eagle ad campaign had a political agenda have defended it by pointing to the cultural inspiration behind the campaign, but even their proposed “apolitical” explanation for the ad carries heavy political weight. The American Eagle ad campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney was a callback to Brooke Shields’s campaign with Calvin Klein in the 1980s, which used the word play of “jean” and “gene” and had a similar script in which the camera pans suggestively over the women’s bodies as they struggle to pull on their jeans and zip up. Both women have been praised as beauty icons, and so the assumed intention of the campaign was to parallel Sweeney’s popularity with that of Shields’s. Many argue that American Eagle aimed to revert to the tried and true marketing adage of “sex sells.” Yet even the original Calvin Klein ad received an enormous amount of criticism for the sexualization of Shields, who was fifteen years old at the time of the ad’s release. At a time when right-wing activists are challenging the legitimacy of removed sexual consent and birth control is being increasingly policed, an ad referencing the sexualization of a young girl is undoubtedly political. Therefore, are we to believe that, with hundreds of employees in American Eagle’s marketing department, not a single one picked up on the potentially political messaging of a white, blonde, blue-eyed woman talking about her “great genes” during a time of increased deportations and American xenophobia? Especially with the actresses’ Republican denomination and association with right-wing communities?
At a time when many others might retreat, American Eagle has dug in their heels and denied any subliminal messaging, saying that they “stand behind what [they] did.” And, clearly, their gamble paid off. American Eagle’s stock has doubled since the release of the campaign. The campaign has brought in a million new customers between July and August. Republican President Trump himself was full of praise, tweeting on his social media platform, Truth Social, “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are ‘flying off the shelves.’ Go get ‘em Sydney!” Following his comments on August 4th, American Eagle’s stocks soared more than 23 percent. Conservatism is profitable today, and corporate America has caught on. With many conservatives lending both verbal and financial support to the campaign and many progressives in uproar over it, it seems those most ill-inclined to realize the political messaging of advertisements are those caught up in the back-and-forth marketing game. Still reeling from the era of progressive marketing and the sharp cultural turn, consumers question why American Eagle would want to release an ad nodding to eugenics, and chalk the uncannily suggestive messaging up to being an accident that the marketing team overlooked. Yet, in advertising, nothing is accidental. As President Trump forewarned, “It’s time to beat the Radical Left at their own game. Money does talk.” And talk it has. In this era of corporate marketing, the right has emerged atop… for now.