American Eagle's ridiculous response to its Sydney Sweeney ad backlash raises eyebrows

Unless you've been living under a rock, or indeed a giant pile of jeans (that's jeans with a 'j'), you've probably heard about the furore surrounding American Eagle's recent denim ad featuring actress Sydney Sweeney. You can read about the controversy here, but in a nutshell: the tagline "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans," a clearly intended as a ham-fisted pun on 'genes' in reference to her body, has been accused of being in favour of eugenics.

While everybody from a million Twitter strangers to Donald Trump has commented on the ad, we hadn't heard anything from American Eagle itself until now. And the company's official statement is, like the ad itself, raising eyebrows.

"Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans" is and always was about the jeans," reads the statement, which the company posted to Instagram. "Her jeans. Her story. We'll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone."

There are a couple of things to unpack here. First is the subtly ridiculous corporate speak ascribing a ridiculous amount of lore and sentimentality to factory-produced garments. I'm not sure my own jeans have a 'story', and I'm not sure a pair Sydney Sweeney was paid to wear for a few minutes do either.

Then there's what's clearly an outright lie. Was it really always "about the jeans," American Eagle? Did you really not deliberately make a pun on the word 'genes'? Were said pun and said actress not specifically chosen for one-another? The faux ignorance is utterly unbelievable. Whether or not the eugenics row was foreseen by the company, there can be no doubt that it knew its tagline was provocative.

But perhaps the weirdest thing is how the statement kind of looks like... a poem? Specifically the kind of poem that was all the rage on Instagram in around 2017. From the plain blue background to the small, serif text, American Eagle seems to want to create the impression that we're reading a seminal literary text.

The whole thing seems pretty disingenuous, and needless to say, nobody's buying it. "They know exactly what they did. They just think we are so dumb that they can gaslight us into thinking they were never talking about “genes” even though they LITERALLY DID A PLAY ON WORDS FOR THE CAMPAIGN," one Redditor comments, while another adds, "“How dare you call us on the obvious double-entendre we made” is for sure a choice!"