There aren’t many advertising campaigns that elicit responses from the US president and vice-president, the senator Ted Cruz and the rappers Doja Cat and Lizzo. But the Euphoria actor Sydney Sweeney’s recent ad for American Eagle denim has done just that.
Critics have interpreted the campaign as promoting eugenics, defenders have taken the backlash as evidence of so-called “woke” culture in the extreme and scrutinising it has taken on the trappings of a cottage industry. “Clocking in for my shift at the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle opinion factory,” the journalist Hunter Harris wrote on her Substack.
It comes in a long line of provocative jeans adverts, some objectively controversial or offensive, others more subjectively so.
A 1973 campaign from Jesus Jeans that featured the slogan “you shall have no other jeans before me” sparked discussion for its use of religiosity to sell clothes. The Italian anti-consumerist film director Pier Paolo Pasolini even wrote an essay on the subject in which he said the slogan “takes the form of a nemesis – although unintentionally – that punishes the church for its pact with the devil”.
A series of 1980s Calvin Klein jeans adverts raised hackles for their use of young female models in sexually suggestive guises. “You know what gets between me and my Calvin’s? Nothing,” mused a 15-year-old Brooke Shields in 1980, in a video directed and shot by Richard Avedon.
In another Calvin Klein campaign from 1995, which was criticised for alluding to child exploitation, models including Kate Moss were filmed as they undid their jeans and were asked: “Are you nervous?”
“Calvin made millions,” said Allen Adamson, an author and branding expert. “He was the first one to really understand that buzz and controversy and being disruptive could sell denim.” The Shields campaign was reportedly a huge success, with many customers going into shops to ask for the “Brooke Shields jeans”.
Levi’s also has a history of setting tongues wagging. The famous Nick Kamen ad from the 80s, in which he strips down to his underwear in a laundrette so he can wash his 501s, turned the straight male gaze of most mainstream ads on its head by making the object of desire a male model. According to the fashion historian Tony Glenville: “It was massive and made it even into spoofs on comedy shows. It made a huge impact on sales and jeans sales generally.”
Levi’s made its mark again in 1995 with a campaign in which the Filipino-American fashion designer Zaldy, sitting in the back of a New York taxi in drag, seems to shock the sweaty, lecherous driver ogling her by shaving her chin mid-drive. Landing at a time when there was a lack of LGBTQ+ representation in advertising, the Advertising Standards Authority reportedly came close to banning it.
According to the retail marketing expert Catherine Shuttleworth, campaigns designed to turn heads evolve from a need to “cut through”. “Good advertising creates cut through, and when it comes to advertising for clothing, it’s really hard to grab people’s attention,” she said.
Cutting through in the social media age is arguably much harder than before given the fragmentation of media. Adamson said: “It’s very expensive to reach consumers through traditional media, so you need social media to break through,” especially to reach younger consumers.
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But given the fact that “no one shares anything ordinary on social media,” it needs to be bold. “People only share something extraordinary or different or offensive,” he said. “To really get talked about on social media, you have to ruffle feathers.”
For jeans this is particularly important. “The basic challenge is that they’ve been around forever”, said Adamson. “There is little to no product difference. People can talk about the fit or the stitching. It’s basically denim.”
Glenville agreed: “Sometimes the actual jeans can be a bit dull. It’s packaging within the advertising, it’s styling and narrative that sells them.”
More so than in the past, the market for denim is also saturated. “The denim market in America is ginormous,” said Shuttleworth. “You’ve got to do something that makes you stand out from the pack. And so I think a lot of those companies will take risks.”
Even going as far as to get your ad banned might be a good thing, she said. “By getting it banned, everybody talks about it [but] if you get it wrong, suddenly you could have a long-term problem where people boycott your products.”
For Adamson, the worst possible scenario for fashion advertising is that “no one notices or no one cares”.
It’s too early to know what the Sweeney ad’s impact on direct sales will be, but it’s clear that people noticed and cared, andit doesn’t seem to have been bad for business. American Eagle shares climbed 23% in a week, even as commentators began to move on to the next: a Levi’s ad in which Beyoncé wears a blonde wig and red lipstick moved the conservative commentator Megyn Kelly to take umbrage and Piers Morgan to accuse the singer of “culturally appropriating” Marilyn Monroe.