Sydney Sweeney ‘good genes' ad courts controversy
Much of the criticism has swirled around the campaign's title: 'Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,' a play on 'good genes.'
'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,' she says in one video. 'My jeans are blue.'
As part of the campaign, American Eagle is launching a pair of jeans produced in collaboration with Sweeney to raise awareness for domestic violence. The proceeds from each pair's sale, the company says, will go towards a volunteer crisis intervention text line.
Many online commentators, however, honed in on how the blond-haired, blue-eyed actress was repping a prominent American brand in such fashion at a time when the Trump administration has attacked diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and moved to aggressively deport immigrants.
Sayantani DasGupta, a lecturer at Columbia University, said in a TikTok video that the campaign was 'really imbued with eugenic messaging' and compared its tagline to remarks President Trump made in 2020 about how Minnesotans had 'good genes.'
'It is both a testament to this political moment, and it's contributing to and reinforcing this kind of anti-immigrant, anti-people of color, pro-eugenic political moment,' she said of the campaign, adding that she planned to teach it in one of her courses in Columbia's narrative medicine program in the fall.
DasGupta's video has garnered more than three million views.
In another video, the reference to genes is overt: Sweeney, clad in denim, is shown painting over a mural of herself with the words 'Sydney Sweeney has great genes.'
Despite the backlash, American Eagle stocks have jumped, up 20 percent over the past five days. Many observers have deemed it a meme stock.
The campaign also bears similarities to a 1980s campaign by actress Brooke Shields for Calvin Klein, which also relied on plays between genes and jeans.
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is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. In book world, the summer of 2025 is officially the summer of Substack. Over the past few years, Substack has been slowly building a literary scene, one in which amateurs, relative unknowns, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers rub shoulders with one another. This spring, a series of writers — perhaps best known for their Substacks — released new fiction, leading to a burst of publicity that the critic, novelist, and Substacker Naomi Kanakia has declared 'Substack summer.' Vox Culture Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 'Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?' asked the New Yorker in May. Substack 'has become the premier destination for literary types' unpublished musings,' announced Vulture. Can Substack move sales like BookTok can? No. But it's doing something that, for a certain set, is almost more valuable. It's giving a shot of vitality to a faltering book media ecosystem. It's building a world where everyone reads the London Review of Books, and they all have blogs. 'I myself think of BookTok as an engine for discovery, and I think Substack is an engine for discourse,' said the journalist Adrienne Westenfeld. 'BookTok is a listicle in a way. It's people recommending books that you might not have heard of. It's not as much a place for substantive dialogue about books, which is simply a limitation of short form video.' Related How BookTokers make money Three years ago, Westenfeld wrote about Substack's rising literary scene for Esquire. 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'No other piece of new fiction I read last year gave me a bigger jolt of readerly delight,' the New Yorker said in May of Money Matters. It wasn't quite Oprah putting Franzen's Corrections in her book club, but it was still more attention than you would reasonably expect. When Barkan and Pistelli's novels came out in April and May, they garnered a surprising amount of attention, Kanakia said. The books were both ambitious enough to be of potential interest to critics — Glass Century follows an adulterous couple from the 1970s into the present, and Major Arcana deals with a death by suicide at a university. Still, both books were from relatively small presses: Belt Publishing for Major Arcana and Tough Poets Press for Glass Century. That kind of book traditionally has a limited publicity budget, which makes it hard to get reviewed in major outlets. (Not that coverage is all that easy for anyone to get, as Michel noted.) Nonetheless, both Major Arcana and Glass Century got reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. A few weeks later, Kanakia's Money Matters, which she published directly to Substack, was written up in the New Yorker. It wasn't quite Oprah putting Franzen's Corrections in her book club, but it was still more attention than you would reasonably expect. 'I was like, 'Something's happening,'' Kanakia says. ''This is going to be big. This is going to be a moment.'' 'Had this novel been released two or three years ago, it would have been completely ignored,' says Barkan of Glass Century. 'Now it's been widely reviewed, and I credit Substack with that fully.' Pistelli's Major Arcana is even more a product of Substack than the others. Pistelli originally serialized it on Substack, and then self-published before Belt Publishing picked it up. The book didn't garner all that much attention when he was serializing it — Pistelli's feeling is that people don't go to Substack to read fiction — but after it came out in print, Substack became the peg for coverage of the book. 'A lot of the reviews, both positive and negative, treated my novel as kind of a test of whether Substack can produce a serious novel, a novel of interest,' said Pistelli. 'The verdict was mixed.' The theory that Substackers have about Substack is this: As social media and search traffic have both collapsed, the kinds of publications that usually give people their book news — newspapers, literary magazines, book specific websites — have struggled and become harder to find. Substack, which delivers directly to readers' inboxes, has emerged to fill the gap in the ecosystem. 'It's very easy to talk to people and it's very easy to get your writing out there,' said Henry Begler, who writes literary criticism on Substack. 'It feels like a real literary scene, which is something I have never been part of.' While there are lots of newsletter social platforms out there, Substack is fairly unique in that it's both a place for newsletters, which tend towards the essayistic, and, with its Twitter clone Notes app, a place for hot takes and conversations. The two formats can feed off each other. 'It creates an ongoing discussion in a longer and more considered form than it would be on Twitter, where you're just trying to get your zingers out,' says Begler. The buzzy authors of the Substack scene are also all associated with the Substack-based literary magazine The Metropolitan Review. Barkan is co-founder and editor-in-chief, and Kanakia, Pistelli, and Gasda have all written for it, as has Begler. 'Basically, we're just a group of friends online who read each other's newsletters and write for some of the same publications,' said Kanakia. For Barkan, the Metropolitan Review is at the center of a new literary movement, which he's dubbed New Romanticism, that is 'properly exploiting the original freedom promised by Internet 1.0 to yank the English language in daring, strange, and thrilling directions.' Barkan's idea is that the kind of publications that used to host such daring, strange, and thrilling speech no longer do, and the Metropolitan Review is stepping into the breach. He argues somewhat optimistically that the Metropolitan Review, which has around 22,000 subscribers, is 'one of the more widely read literary magazines in America.' The combined mythologies of Metropolitan Review and Substack summer have given these writers the beginnings of a cohesive self-identity. The world they've built with that identity is, interestingly, a bit of a throwback. The literary culture of 2005 is alive and well Here are some characteristics of the literary world of 2005: an enchantment with a group of talented young male writers who wrote primarily big social novels and a lot of excitement about the literary possibilities of a nascent blogosphere. Here are some characteristics of the Substack literary scene: a lot of young male writers, a lot of social novels, and a lot of excitement about the literary possibilities of newsletter essays. Glass Century and Major Arcana are both big, sprawling novels that take place over decades, and Glass Century, in particular, reads as though it was written under the influence of Jonathan Franzen. That's a departure from what's been more recently in vogue, like Karl Ove Knausgaard's titanic autofictional saga. 'I think there's a lot of nostalgia for a time when the novel was maybe a more discussed form or a more vital form or trying to capture a lot more of contemporary society.' 'The big trend in the world of literary fiction for the last decade or so was really autofiction, the idea of you would write a slice of life first person narrated often in a kind of transparent, not very adorned prose,' said Pistelli. 'I think there's been some desire to get back to that bigger canvas social novel that has been lost in the autofictional moment.' Literary Substack in general also seems to espouse a desire to return to a time when literature was more culturally ascendant. 'I think there's a lot of nostalgia for a time when the novel was maybe a more discussed form or a more vital form or trying to capture a lot more of contemporary society,' said Begler. 'It's partially just a shift from one mode of thinking to another, and it's partially a nostalgia for your Franzen and your David Foster Wallace and whatever.' This desire is, in its way, very Franzenian. Franzen famously wrote an essay for Harper's in 1996 in which he describes his 'despair about the American novel' after the jingoism of the lead up to the first Gulf War. Franzen thought that television was bad for the novel; he hadn't yet seen what TikTok could do to a person. While the Franzen mode pops up a lot with this crowd, there are outliers to this loose trend. Gasda's Sleeper is very much a product of millennial fiction (detached voice describing the foibles of Brooklyn literati), and Kanakia's work on Substack, which she calls her 'tales,' tends to be sparse, with little attention paid to description or setting. There's also the question of gender. The amount of men in this literary Substack scene is particularly notable in a moment so rich with essays about the disappearance of men who care about and write books. Some observers have drawn a lesson of sorts from this phenomenon: The mainstream literary world alienated men. They had to flee to Substack to build their own safe haven. 'The literary establishment treats male American writers with contempt,' wrote the writer Alex Perez on his Substack last August. His commenters agreed. The answer, they concluded, was building a platform and self publishing. 'I'm a middle-aged, straight, white, conservative, rich male who writes literary fiction. It's like a demographic poo Yahtzee. I don't stand a chance,' wrote one commenter. 'But I have 85K Twitter followers and an email list with thousands of people, so I can self-publish and sell 5,000 copies of anything I write.' 'These aren't manosphere men who are constantly raging against the influence of women on fiction. These are men just writing.' For the Metropolitan Review crowd, the amount of men in Substack's literary scene is mostly value-neutral. 'I do think there's something to the fact that when I got on Substack, I was like, 'These are people that are producing work that I'm actually interested in and I actually find compelling,' and that they were probably majority men,' said Begler. 'Overall, it's a rather welcoming environment for all,' Barkan adds. 'These aren't manosphere men who are constantly raging against the influence of women on fiction. These are men just writing.' Kanakia thinks the narrative about literary white men is more complicated than literary white men let on, but ultimately harmless. 'In 2025 the varieties of men advocating for themselves — most of them are very horrific. This variety is not so bad,' she says. 'If they want a book deal at Scribners, like, fine, if that'll make you happy. That'll be great. I have no problem with that.' In the meantime, literary Substack keeps expanding. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon just signed up. 'It's smart of him,' says Barkan. 'If I were Michael Chabon and was working on a novel, I would be on Substack. I think more literary writers who have platforms already should be there.' The closest antecedent to this moment did not last. The literary moment of 2005 was blown apart the way everything of that era was: under the pressure of the 2008 recession and the so-called Great Awokening, under the slow collapse of the blogosphere as social media took off — and everything that came along with them. Will the same thing happen to this crowd? It's hard to know for sure this early. At least for right now, Substack is having its summer.
