Does the New American Eagle Ad Mean We’re a Llama Again?

By: Chris Johnson

One of my favorite movies as a kid was the cartoon, “Emperor’s New Groove,” in which the South American emperor Kuzco gets turned into a llama by an advisor who wants to rule in his place. Towards the end of the movie, Kuzco is drinking different magic potions, trying to regain his human form, and instead finding himself as a turtle, a bird, and then a whale. He drinks yet another potion, and celebrates, “Yay! I’m a llama again!” and then, realizing a llama is not what he wants to get back to, “Wait…”

For a moment, it felt right to him to be back in that wrong shape.

If you didn’t have a reason to watch kids’ movies in the early 2000s, I apologize for the obscure reference, but I was reminded of that scene as controversy has emerged surrounding American Eagle’s latest ad campaign.

The ad features the 27-year-old, white actress Sydney Sweeney, who’s been called the “last sex symbol,” wearing American Eagle denim and the tag line, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

Many on the right are celebrating this ad as a win against the “woke” advertising trends of the last decade which opted for messages of “body-positivity” and “beauty in every shape,” rather than using their ideal of the female form to make their product more attractive.

This culminated in decisions like Sports Illustrated Swimsuit’s to feature the very overweight celebrity, Lizzo, as a model in a very revealing swimsuit, and makeup company Ulta’s to feature transgender Dylan Mulvaney on their beauty podcast, which they defended with the statement, “Beauty is for everyone.”

Far less dramatic examples are readily available on nearly every athletic and fashion wear website. Whether you’re surveying Nike, Adidas, Under Armor, Lululemon, Anthropologie, or most other trendy clothing suppliers, it’s almost a challenge to find a woman with skin, hair, and eye color of Sydney Sweeney, where in the decades before, her physical characteristics would have been put forth as the ideal.

Those on the right are not the only ones to take notice of the new American Eagle ads. Oh no, in fact, the new face of a once-trendy college brand probably would not have made a splash in the conservative political sphere were it not for the visceral reaction from social media influencers on the left.

As I scroll through my X feed, I’m bombarded with right wing commentators’ reactions to leftist outrage. What are they outraged by? Its American Eagle’s play on words, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” – the idea that an attractive white girl be commended for her genes. American Eagle is being called racist for acknowledging that the white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed starlet’s physical appearance is attractive.

The liberal website, Salon, reports it this way, “The phrase, used in bold on billboards in Times Square and Las Vegas, was designed as a denim pun. But online, many saw something else: ‘great genes,’ a phrase historically used to celebrate whiteness, thinness and attractiveness. This makes this campaign seem to be a tone-deaf marketing move.”

So where does Emperor Kuzco come into this? Well, like when he became a llama again, this is not the form we’re trying to get back to. We don’t want to go back to the days where Carl’s Jr. is using Kate Upton in a bikini to sell hamburgers during the Super Bowl. We don’t want to go back to Abercrombie and Fitch selling quarterly porn magazines to kids to build their brand.

But, it would be nice to go back to a time where they wouldn’t be called racist for doing so.

“Beauty in ever shape” is a much more God-glorifying advertising strategy than one which teaches men to judge women’s attractiveness in relation to Pamela Anderson.

Let’s make the next advertising era one where we can celebrate the humanity of people made in God’s Image, rather than going back to a time where advertisers simply appealed to our animal natures.

To view this article in your browser, Click Here

For more information, articles and newsletters, please check out our website at https://americandecency.org/

You can support ADA financially by visiting: https://give.cornerstone.cc/americandecency

 

---