Why Calling Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ‘Good Genes’ Ad Nazi Propaganda Trivializes History

If we keep calling every awkward ad ‘literal Nazi propaganda,’ we’re not resisting fascism. We’re just making it harder to recognise when it actually appears.

---

I haven’t been writing much for Blaugust this year — partly because I keep drafting posts that turn into sprawling essays, and partly because I’m still halfway through an overly ambitious “introduction to everyone” post that’s probably not going to be finished before September. But sometimes a topic drops straight into your lap, and this one happens to touch on something I care deeply about: the trivialization of Nazi history.

Recently, American Eagle released an ad featuring Sydney Sweeney posing sensually in “great jeans” while delivering a pseudo-intellectual monologue about hereditary traits passed down from parents. It ends with the tagline, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”, a cheeky pun on “genes.”
Silly enough, right? Well, not for everyone: the ad has been accused of being “literal Nazi propaganda” and of promoting eugenics or white supremacist ideas.

In this post, I want to unpack why the ad sparked outrage, compare it to actual historic Nazi propaganda, and explain why many of the most extreme claims don’t hold up. Finally, I’ll tackle what I see as the most important point:
Why careless comparisons risk trivialising one of the darkest chapters in human history.

1. The Outrage
2. The War on Hot Women
3. Literal Nazi Propaganda
4. The Trivialization of Nazi Ideologies
5. So, what’s my take?

The Outrage

For starters, I don’t think the ad is “harmless”, as some conservative types and literal republican politicians are claiming. The fact that people are reacting this way shows that there are definitely undertones that people associate with dangerous ideas.

The way this worry and fear are voiced, however, is definitely an overreach. It’s the death of nuance. There is a level on which one might misunderstand this ad (and American Eagle’s PR team is probably well aware of this), but it’s not as bad as a lot of folks make it out to be.

At the core of the controversy lies the double meaning: Good genes, as in hereditary features, and good jeans, as in [insert brand here]. Critics argue that there’s a dangerous association with “genetic goodness”, especially due to the blonde, blue-eyed spokesperson, calling it eugenicist or even reminiscent of Nazi propaganda.

Scholars like Sayantani DasGupta labelled the ad “imbued with eugenic messaging” whilst pointing to implied beauty standards and a lack of racial diversity in the campaign. Sophie Gilbert from the Atlantic claims: “The slogan ‘Sydney Sweeney has good jeans’ obviously winks at the obsession with eugenics that’s so prevalent among the modern right”. (For more quotes, check out this article from The Guardian.)

Another point of contention is the fact that this ad references the infamous 1980s Calvin Klein campaign that starred 15-year-old Brooke Shields. Directed by Richard Avedon, the ad featured a similar scientific-sounding monologue, even going as far as speaking of evolution and “survival of the fittest”, before pivoting to the jeans.

That ad, however, is infamous primarily for the adolescent and sexual overtones. On top of that, again, Shields was a minor. Brooke Shields, only 15 years old at the time, got heavily sexualized by the director Avedon, which shouldn’t sit well with people even today.

The American Eagle ad leans much harder into sexuality and aesthetic fixation (cleavage, blue eyes, “great genes”), which in return sparks even more cultural criticism, especially now that literal politicians like Trump and Cruz are commenting on it.

The War on Hot Women

This isn’t the main point of my post, but it’s hard to ignore: lately, simply being an attractive woman seems to have become “problematic.”

Sydney Sweeney is, objectively speaking, conventionally attractive, on top of being a talented actor. She gets roles and endorsements partly because she fits widely shared ideas of beauty, just like countless other actors, male and female, do. But beauty ideals aren’t fixed. Throughout history, we’ve prized everything from dark eyes to blonde hair, from curvy “fertility” figures to ultra-thin silhouettes in the French “heroin chic” era. Today, there isn’t one universal standard, however. Curves, thin frames, muscular builds, and softer physiques all can be seen as attractive, depending on the viewer.

That’s why it’s so frustrating to watch public outrage over an ad turn into personal attacks on the model’s looks. If you hate the campaign, direct that at American Eagle’s marketing team. Yet I’ve seen people call Sweeney “ugly,” accuse her of pandering to nationalists simply for looking the way she does, and even claim her initials (“SS”) mean something sinister, as if everyone born in ’88 is automatically a Nazi.

This isn’t progressive criticism; it’s recycled misogyny. It doesn’t challenge beauty standards but ends up reinforcing the idea that women’s appearances are fair game for character attacks whenever it’s convenient. And when people who call themselves feminists do it, it’s not just hypocritical, it’s counterproductive.

Also, here’s a video that portrays a lot of the wilder opinions uttered by the chronically online, if interested.

Literal Nazi Propaganda

The common image of Nazi propaganda is a poster-perfect blonde Aryan woman… but that’s not actually what people saw most of the time back then.

A lot of very vocal people criticising the campaign go as far as calling this literal Nazi propaganda, so I wanted to talk about literal Nazi propaganda for a bit. Now, obviously, I’m no historian, but Nazi Germany is something we learned about in school, extensively, including visits to concentration camps and museums, a lot of literature read about the period in our German, History and Ethics/Religion classes.

In Germany, we learn A LOT about Nazi Germany because it’s our duty to make sure that this never happens again… even if our politicians are currently letting it happen again but that’s another topic.

So, while I am no expert, I can talk about what I know… and what I do know of Nazi propaganda is that it used beauty imagery sparingly. Racially “ideal” archetypes, like the “Aryan” woman, featuring characteristics like blone hair, fair skin and blue eyes, typically with symmetrical and unblemished faces, weren’t actually used as often as people tend to believe in the posters and adverts. That’s because overexposure to this ideal would “cheapen” it. This ideal was something that was treasured by people and it was almost seen as something religious by people.

Rather than explicitly promoting “Aryan” women or whatever as an ideal, nazi propaganda focused on portraying women as nurturing mothers, robust farm workers and youthful symbols of fertility. Women are supposed to be modest and caring. They’re icons that sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Men are supposed to be strong, disciplined, heroic and militarised.

Clothing was traditional and modest, often featuring classic German garbs (see “Trachten”) or military uniforms (in the case of men). There definitely was the “ideal” phenotype portrayed from time to time, but the vast majority of the German population didn’t fit that ideal, which is why propaganda didn’t feature it as often as people seem to believe.

Rather than focusing on declaring this ideal the non-plus-ultra or whatever, the Nazis were trying to inspire people to reproduce with those who fit the racial ideals. Eugenics were seen as positive and aspirational, but it was very subtle in the marketing.

More than anything, though, Nazi propaganda didn’t focus primarily on promoting the beauty standard of the “Aryan” woman but rather demonised and caricaturized the unideal women of other races. The soviets, for instance, were portrayed as bulky, muscular and manly. The Jews were portrayed with long, witch-like noses, amongst other things, often also shown in expensive garbs going out at night in an unmodest way.

But posters showing women that they have to be hard workers, caring mothers, and modest and respectable people portrayed beautiful women even if they had brown hair or brown eyes or whatever, because that’s just the common phenotype amongst the German population at the time.

The Trivialization of Nazi Ideologies

To call the American Eagle ad “literal” Nazi propaganda is not simply false; it’s actually dangerous.

I doubt that American Eagle “literally” wanted to promote nazism and white supremacy with their ad. They just wanna sell jeans. “Good” jeans. As such, using “literally” is bad here because it borders on defamation.

But the claim is also very dangerous because it trivialises what Nazi ideologies were about. Using terms like “Nazism” or “Eugenics” in this context without understanding the horrible nature of these terms and the historical facts and everything is something that runs the risk of people forgetting about one of the darkest chapters in human history. It’s a dangerous type of amnesia to have.

Just look at this poster to the right here and compare it to the American Eagle ad. Tell me how exactly these ads are similar. I guess Sydney Sweeney is posing as someone who makes bank but I don’t think the purity symbolism or the ideal of a “modest and proper” woman or whatever else are seen in the ad.

There definitely is an overlap in talking about “good genes” and having a white, blonde, blue-eyed woman as a spokesperson. There definitely is a certain tone present that can be misunderstood, and American Eagle 100% wanted it to create outrage.

But to go as far as to equate this very sensual ad to the incredibly sexist and terrible Nazi propaganda that, at times, reinforced Aryans and excluded non-Aryans as members of the “People’s Community” is ludicrous and vile.

Heck, look up Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the “Reichsfrauenführerin”, who was promoted as a model Aryan woman wearing national dress or NS uniforms and personifying the “Reich’s mother in chief”, promoting ideals such as domesticity and fertility.

There is definitely an argument to be made about how sexuality in ads is the 21st century’s version of “fertility” as an ideal. There is a link somewhere there but even that is a reach. I’m not too sure if the Sydney Sweeney who wears blue jeans so confidently is portraying domesticity as an ideal necessarily.

So, what’s my take?

I do think American Eagle’s PR team knew exactly what they were doing.

The ad has undertones that brush up against ideologies about certain genes being “good”… but it never says Sydney Sweeney has the best genes (or jeans). It’s just “good genes.” And saying someone has “good genes” doesn’t automatically imply everyone else’s are bad.

The loudest voices in this discourse are overreacting in a way that’s actually dangerous.

They’re trivialising how bad Nazi Germany truly was, and how destructive eugenics is as an ideology, by acting as if this cheeky, rage-bait denim ad is somehow equivalent to what the Nazis were doing. It’s not. Pretending it is risks dulling the public’s historical memory… and that’s the real threat, especially in contemporary discourse as tyranny is unfolding in the United States and as a genocide is unfolding in the Middle-East.

I understand the diversity and representation concerns scholars have raised. The undertones are there… but to me it’s obvious American Eagle was riffing on an equally controversial 1980s Calvin Klein ad, and banking on outrage to get free publicity. All they have to do is run it a few times on YouTube or Instagram, and the chronically online will spread it for them at no cost whatsoever.

That doesn’t make it harmless. The conservatives claiming that it is are wrong. But so are the people flinging around “Nazi” labels and accusing Sydney Sweeney herself of white supremacy. That’s lazy, it’s toxic, and it misses the target.

Genocide is bad. Don’t play it down.
Don’t forget the darkest chapters. Ever. Don’t ignore the fact that one of the most well-documented genocides in history is unfolding right now, with governments (including Germany’s) giving it tacit support while still mouthing “Never Again.” Be angry at that. Not at some deliberately provocative jeans commercial.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.