Jeans: Symbol of culture wars after viral ads

SINGAPORE – Casual denim faced some serious charges in 2025 as a hugely viral American Eagle jeans ad was variously labelled Nazi, MAGA – “Make America great again” being US President Donald Trump’s pet slogan – and a slam dunk against woke marketing.

The fractious campaign, launched in July and taglined “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans”, stars the American actress in a series of videos.

In one, the camera pans over a supine Sweeney squirming into her pants as she delivers a crash course in Mendelian genetics: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.” Wink, wink.

Another video shows Sweeney sticking a campaign poster to a billboard. To hammer in the pun, the word “genes” is crossed out on the poster and corrected to “jeans”.

The whiff of eugenics sustained a cottage industry of online discourse, also known as zingy tweets and Substack think pieces, for weeks. Critics cried “pure aryan race bulls***”, defenders gloated at the “woke left’s” paranoia.

Then, a Gap jeans ad starring multiracial girl group Katseye hit the internet about a month later.

The energetic choreography to Kelis’ 2003 track Milkshake promptly went viral. Fans seized on the ad as a foil to Sweeney’s controversial campaign and her American Eagle videos on YouTube are now flooded with comments from viewers referencing Milkshake.

And thus jeans became the unlikely new frontier of the overheated culture wars.

Commercial outcomes have been inconclusive. American Eagle’s stock rose 30 per cent, but Sweeney, who for months stayed tight-lipped on the fracas, told People’s Magazine on Dec 7 that she regretted her silence. It had “widened the divide between people”, said the 28-year-old, who is not yet clear of the crosshairs.

Meanwhile, Gap’s Better In Denim viral ad starring Katseye was one of the brand’s most successful campaigns to date, leading to double-digit sales growth, powered by Gen Z, said chief executive Richard Dickson on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

The run of buzzy jeans ads in 2025, including a Levi’s campaign with pop star Beyonce and a Lucky jeans ad with singer Addison Rae, is part of the so-called denim wars – the fight between brand heavyweights to keep jeans relevant with splashy celebrity campaigns.

But the broader truth might be that fashion loves controversy and jeans marketing tends to court it more aggressively, in part because the humble trousers can feel like a victim of its own ubiquity.

American brand Calvin Klein is behind some of the garment’s most famous and discomfiting marketing. A 1980s campaign had American actress Brooke Shields, then 15, musing: “You know what gets between me and my Calvin’s? Nothing.”

In a 1995 ad, British model Kate Moss, who was then 21, and a crew of young models were filmed undoing the top button of their jeans, while a voice asked: “Are you nervous?” It drew flak for alluding to child exploitation.

Call it a sign of the times. Some 30 years later, the biggest ad of the year hinged on a political, rather than sexual taboo.