Decades before Sydney Sweeney‘s American Eagle ad campaign sparked online furor, a series of jeans commercials featuring Brooke Shields similarly ignited controversy. In 1980, a 15-year-old Shields starred in a series of print and TV ads for Calvin Klein. One TV spot, in which she delivered the brand’s suggestive tagline — “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” — caused outrage given Shields’ age, leading some networks to decline to run the ads. The campaign also included a commercial in which Shields used wordplay involving “jeans” and “genes,” with Shields stating: “Genes are fundamental in determining the characteristics of an individual and passing on these characteristics to succeeding generations.”
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This spot returned to the cultural limelight amid backlash surrounding American Eagle’s recent campaign titled “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” In one video promoted by the company, the actress says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.” Critics saw it as nodding to eugenics, the discredited theory embraced by Nazi Germany that claimed humanity could be improved by breeding for specific traits. “It’s the same playbook: a very hot model saying provocative things shot in an interesting way,” Allen Adamson, co-founder of marketing consultancy Metaforce, told AP about the two campaigns. While Sweeney hasn’t addressed the backlash, Shields told Vogue in 2021 about her own ads, “I feel like the controversy backfired. The campaign was extremely successful.”
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This story appeared in the Aug. 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
