A trivial jeans advertisement featuring Sydney Sweeney triggers disproportionate accusations of eugenics, revealing an inconvenient truth. This case is not an isolated incident, but a symptom of “political correctness” that, perhaps, has never been a true cultural achievement but only a marketing trend. Let us analyze how this controversy unmasks the hypocrisy of “Woke Capitalism” and the dangerous drift of a public debate now incapable of nuance, trapped between preemptive censorship and algorithmic polarization.
Let’s start with a fact, almost trivial. A clothing chain, American Eagle, chooses the testimonial of the moment, Sydney Sweeney, for a new campaign. The play on words is disarmingly simple: “Sydney Has Great Jeans.” Jeans as in pants, genes as in genes. An intentional allusion, of course, in which she jokes that her uniqueness comes as much from her pants as from her DNA.
The teaser video, not even the main campaign, raises a ruckus. The accusation, immediate and fierce, is heavy-handed: eugenics. Yes, you read that right. Because Sweeney embodies a certain stereotype of Western beauty — blond, blue-eyed, generously shaped — the campaign is immediately linked to conspiracy theories such as “grand ethnic substitution” and to the propaganda of the dog whistle, that coded message perceptible only to a certain kind of audience.
The reaction is so violent that it feels like an open-handed slap. But perhaps it is just the slap we needed to look in the mirror and ask ourselves: what is broken in our understanding of public debate?
But perhaps it is just the slap in the face we needed to look in the mirror and ask ourselves: what is broken in our understanding of public debate?
Concept Creep: Quando le Parole Perdono Peso
What is most interesting, and at times surreal, is that we are applying a very serious term like eugenics-which evokes ethnic cleansing and forced sterilization programs-to a jeans advertisement. This is a textbook example of what psychologist Nick Haslam has called concept creep, the semantic slippage of concepts. We use words born to describe unspeakable trauma and horror for trivial situations, draining them of their power and historical meaning.
This phenomenon leads us straight to a kind of neo-puritanism of inclusiveness. A performative anxiety where every joke, every allusion, every content not perfectly aligned with a rigid, self-imposed canon is immediately tried and condemned. But this attitude does not educate; on the contrary, it achieves the exact opposite. It triggers an equal and opposite reaction, as evidenced by the exultation of former Fox News anchors celebrating “finally a beautiful white, blonde girl in an ad.” Polarization feeds on itself: the more you push from one side, the more you generate an identical push from the opposite side.
Polarization feeds on itself: the more you push from one side, the more you generate an identical push from the opposite side.
Woke Capitalism and the Death of DEI
The move by American Eagle, which until a few months earlier produced denim hijabs and chose African-American female athletes as testimonials, reveals only apparent communication schizophrenia. It may not be a gaffe, but a calculated gamble. In the attention economy, as we know, controversy is also currency. A conscious provocation to pierce the background noise.
Most importantly, this episode exposes the great hypocrisy of what is called Woke Capitalism. It confronts us with the fundamental question that has long been swirling in the industry: has the push for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) been a real change in values or just the latest profitable marketing gimmick?
If DEI is just a fad, then it acts like one. Just like fidget spinners or fast fashion color trends, it vanishes when the social and political climate changes. The abandonment of inclusive narratives to return to more traditional models is not a step backward, it is the simple realization that that marketing model has stopped paying off. DEI, as implemented by many companies, may not be dead: perhaps it never really existed as a foundational value, but only as a tactical tool.
The Public Debate between Hyperbole and Homologation.
If any content risks being accused of the worst crimes against humanity on the basis of the most extremist interpretation possible, where do we draw the line? The real risk is preemptive censorship, where companies, out of fear of media lynching (lynch mob), produce increasingly bland, safe and, as a result, invisible communications.
Public debate is shaped by these hyperbolic clashes over trivial issues. We get used to shouted communication, where nuance-which should be the heart of any mature discourse-is the first casualty. This does not help form knowledgeable citizens, but only radicalizes factions that, by definition, are impervious to dialogue.
In all of this, the role of social media algorithms is central. They are designed to amplify emotional reactions, be it furious indignation or scornful derision. And so, a marginal controversy over a mediocre advertisement is inflated to an event of global significance, completely distorting our perception of priorities and the scale of real issues.
In closing, this story is not about Sydney Sweeney or a pair of jeans. It’s about us. Our culture, digital and otherwise. Our now chronic inability to calibrate reactions, in a kind of bulimic hunger for cheap outrage.
The American Eagle campaign, whether intentional or not, acted like a chemical reagent: it exploded the latent instability of our debate, exposed the fragility of a political correctness that turned out to be only a passing trend. And this loss of the ability to dialogue, to accept complexity and nuance, is a real problem. A problem we cannot delegate to a clothing company, because the impoverishment of public discourse is a collective responsibility.
