Jeans ad is regressive as can be

Opinion

American Eagle Outfitters has ideas on what makes for great jeans. And possibly also great genes.

The U.S. fashion retailer has been boiling in hot water for the past week for an ad campaign starring actor Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria, White Lotus) whose whole premise is built on the fact that “jeans” and “genes” are homophones.

“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans/genes.”

Yes, that’s right. American Eagle thought it would be a good idea to have a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who embodies western beauty standards talk about inherited traits and then seemed surprised when people online were like “hmm, this seems like an ad for eugenics.”

“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue,” Sweeney purrs in one clip. (Also, and I ask this sincerely, but… what?)

This whole thing could have been avoided entirely if American Eagle had simply invited a diverse range of other famous beautiful people to participate in the campaign. After all, jeans come in a wide variety of shapes, styles and colours. Exactly like — and I’m just brainstormin’ here — the people who wear them.

Either the company didn’t anticipate that people’s take-home message might be “our jeans (wink) are better than other kinds of jeans (double wink),” or it fully intended it, because controversy keeps things firmly ensconced in an ever-shortening news cycle. Also, if you need another indicator of what side of history this campaign is on, U.S. President Donald Trump loves it, as does the Proud Boys neo-fascist group.

Of course, people will say “it’s just an ad.”

We all like to believe we are not influenced by advertising, that it doesn’t work on us, that we’re too smart to be fooled by its tricks of persuasion. OK, sure, but what kind of ketchup do you buy? What kind of car do you drive? What jingles live in your head rent free? (I’d love to get a selective lobotomy to get TRESemmé, TRESemmé, ooh la la! out of there.)

But we are bombarded by thousands of advertisements a day, and their influence on us isn’t always obvious. Advertising has tremendous power in establishing, reinforcing and perpetuating beauty standards and cultural norms. We’ve all seen vintage ads shared around social media, gawking at what was once considered acceptable.

American media critic Jean Kilbourne, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing in my early days at the Free Press, has been sounding the alarm for years about the harms of advertising, especially to girls and women.

She was among the first to draw the line from women depicted in ads as just a set of legs or just a torso to objectification, and objectification very often leads to violence. Or having fashion spreads featuring very thin models, which can create negative body image in girls and women, which can then lead to disordered eating. Or the creation of insecurities — dark underarms, cellulite, any evidence of aging — that they can later profit off by selling products targeting those exact insecurities.

The infamous 1980 Calvin Klein ad which featured a then-15-year-old Brooke Shields, and which the American Eagle ad is clearly aping, actively sexualized a minor.

We know all of this. I’m not saying anything new. And yet.

These days, it’s not just traditional advertising that we should be critical of. It’s also influencers who are even more insidious because they seem like regular people or friends. They are promoting a lifestyle, and the products they hawk often feel like recommendations from a peer. Targeted ads infiltrate every part of our online experience.

It felt as though there was some forward momentum on this file in the 2010s. France passed a law that requires retouched images of models to be labelled as such. Plus-sized models were much more visible in fashion and beauty campaigns. Dove, which I have been critical of in the past, at least made attempts at being progressive in a suite of viral ads celebrating “real” beauty. Unfortunately, no amount of progressive advertising changes what Dove is selling, which is the promise of softer, younger and therefore more beautiful skin. The product is not, and has never been, self-acceptance.

Lately, though, there’s been a real return to How Things Were. To standard sizing, to diet culture, to Y2K beauty norms, to white women talking about their great genes (sorry, jeans).

Promoting a very specific body type with a very specific hair and eye colour as ideal isn’t edgy. It’s as throwback as it gets.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca