Sydney Sweeney, Brooke Shields, and corporate America

American Eagle stock has risen over 20% after Donald Trump praised its new jeans commercials with Sydney Sweeney. The ads have received backlash for allegedly winking at eugenicists with a play on the word “jeans”—a groaner harking back to Calvin Klein’s ’80s campaign with Brooke Shields. And the outrage isn’t just coming from some TikTok leftists. The brouhaha has earned comments from supposedly serious people like Marcus Collins, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan, who declared that either the ad script “was ignorance, or this was laziness, or this was intentional.” If American Eagle had consulted with him, they could have avoided all this by having women of different races model the jeans. As it is, maybe they’re doing covert fascism, and maybe they’re not. Who can really say?

Most of the counter-takes have focused on the sheer ridiculousness of this claim. Evidently, American Eagle felt the same way and released a statement refusing to apologize for this made-up sin. This in turn has been celebrated as a sign that nature is healing, woke is dying, and America is ready to return to a golden age of … well, wait a minute, what exactly? 

The missing ingredient in all the takes and counter-takes is that most of these ads, in their sly salaciousness, are less innocent than claimed.  Suffice it to say, Sweeney apes much more than Brooke Shields’ punning. Only one of the new spots could be called wholesome, as Sweeney tinkers with a car while wearing clothes that actually cover her. The others are in the style of the sexually suggestive advertising of the 1980s. We are purposefully not including links. We also aren’t linking to the old ads with Shields. At the time, she was extremely young—15, to be exact. In one spot, she answers the rhetorical question, “What comes between me and my Calvin Kleins?” The answer, of course, is “nothing.” Shields claims that she was too naive to grasp the double entendre, nor did she know how the camera was going to zoom in and linger between her legs. 

In 1980, the broader culture was still shockable enough, over actually shockworthy things, that the campaign sparked some serious outrage. Journalists, happy to milk the drama, began to hound Shields with outrageously inappropriate questions. But the campaign was a commercial smash, putting Calvin Klein on the corporate map. He would, of course, stoop to even more objectifying depths with his underwear line, which exploited young men and women’s bodies alike. On a retrospective podcast with Shields, he thanked her for “changing his life.” To make the whole thing bleaker, their partnership had been orchestrated by her mother. 

Why does this sordid little walk down corporate history lane matter today? Because it’s a history that seems to have faded from the collective memory of the left and the new right alike. While the left manufactures outrage over new “sins,” the new right has confused a return to the old ones for a “conservative’s” cultural victory.

Sweeney is “saving advertising,” The Spectator enthuses, by harking back to the glory days when corporations “used truth, beauty, humor, and intelligence to sell things.” The article further waxes nostalgic about how, just as Brad Pitt rescued the Levi’s brand by putting them on and taking them off, so Diet Coke was rescued in similarly “intelligent” fashion by having a “muscly hunk” take off his shirt to drink a can (while female co-workers ogle him). Conveniently, the Shields campaign escapes the writer’s rosy revisitation, perhaps because it’s harder to whitewash on closer scrutiny.

While Sweeney hasn’t been claimed as a “conservative” icon, exactly, she has been remade in some corners as an icon of a better, simpler time in our history—where “better and simpler” has somehow become co-identified with “that time when everyone ogled or idolized the cute, well-endowed girls who didn’t wear enough clothes.” These new ads are now being seen as a continuation of this revival spirit. If conservatives aren’t seizing the moment to throw a party, we’re just not getting it, and we’ll never win the culture back. Or something like that.

The “Conservative Dad’s Calendar” operated on the same bankrupt principles. To jog everyone’s memory, this product was marketed by a beer company as an “anti-woke” answer to Dylan Mulvaney’s Bud Light campaign. It featured female “conservative” icons in various states of undress (activist athlete Riley Gaines among them, sadly). To do the instant replay: This was a product with “conservative” in the name, expressly pitched to fathers, baiting them with pictures of scantily clad women. When I wrote about this for WORLD Opinions, I said that you couldn’t defeat new decadence with old.

I was right then. I’m still right now.