Teen Talk: The New “Jeans” of America
When a jeans ad turned into a nationwide debate about race, beauty, and identity, it revealed something deeper: the real “genes” of America are more colorful than ever.
[Left] Sydney Sweeney in the American Eagle ad campaign. (Credit: American Eagle)
If you had told me a few months ago that the biggest summer controversy would involve jeans, I would’ve laughed. Like, out of all things—jeans? But this August, it felt like I couldn’t escape them. Every TikTok scroll, every Billboard ad, every news headline, it seemed, was all about jeans.
But here’s the thing: people weren’t suddenly obsessed with denim. Nope. The whole conversation had taken a wild turn—away from fashion and straight into diversity, representation, and even eugenics. It all started with an ad so controversial that it got everyone talking, including the President of the United States, even though it was only to add fuel to the controversy.
To get why people were so fired up about this jeans ad, we need to rewind a bit. Back in 1980, Calvin Klein released a commercial featuring a young Brooke Shields seductively zipping up her jeans while talking about how natural selection “filters out those genes better equipped than others to endure in the environment.” Like… what? I still can’t wrap my head around how anyone thought Darwin and denim belonged in the same sentence. Are we saying ripped skinny jeans will help me evolve into a fitter species? Yeah, sure.
Fast-forward to July 2025. American Eagle decided to “pay homage” to that old ad with an ad campaign starring actress Sydney Sweeney. In it, Sweeney zips up a pair of jeans while explaining that “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.” In another ad from the same campaign, a male narrator says, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
Cue collective facepalm.
Viewers called out the ad’s coded message: white, blonde, and blue-eyed is what makes for great American genes. Even though American Eagle insisted that the ad campaign “is and always was about the jeans,” it is hard to imagine that the company was so inexcusably tone deaf about the eugenics message coming from conflating “jeans” with “genes,” when the only representation of that message was a white, blonde, and blue-eyed celebrity. Their unconvincing defense of the campaign would pass only if other, non-white models or celebrities were also featured.
Fortunately, there was a plot twist in the story of clothing brands making cultural statements. Just as American Eagle was getting roasted online, Gap stepped into the fray with their new campaign featuring the global music group KATSEYE and carried the tagline, “Your individuality. Your self-expression. Your style.”
It was everything American Eagle’s ad wasn’t.
KATSEYE’s ad radiated authenticity—the kind that can’t be faked. The group itself is built on diversity: members hail from the Philippines, Switzerland (originally from Ghana), the U.S., India, and South Korea. Their music, their fashion, even their choreography weave in each member’s cultural roots. Lara Raj, the group’s Tamil-American member, often rocks a bindi and was recently seen dressed as a rakshasi for a promo event. In the ad, she’s even wearing an Om necklace.
It’s no wonder the video blew up—38 million views and counting. It wasn’t just the catchy beat; it was the message: we see you, all of you.
Seeing KATSEYE’s rise feels symbolic of something bigger happening in America right now. We’ve gone from cringing at every “cheese-touch” brown kid on TV to celebrating celebs like Lara Raj, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Avantika, and Simone Ashley—talents who show India and South Asia in all their color and confidence.
[Right] “Your individuality. Your self-expression. Your style,” says the tagline of Gap’s campaign featuring the global music group KATSEYE.
(Credit: Bjorn Iooss/GAP)
And honestly? It hits different.
When I scroll through TikTok and see people calling Avantika or Lara “pretty” or “hot,” I can’t help but feel a small jolt of pride. It’s such a simple thing, but it reminds me of a time when “brown” wasn’t celebrated—it was mocked. Now, we’re seeing something shift.
That same shift is what made the outrage over the Sweeney ad so strong. Because the truth is, the “jeans” and “genes” of America aren’t just blue anymore. They’re brown, black, gold, olive, ivory. They’re South Asian, Korean, Vietnamese, African, Chinese—and everything in between. That’s the real fabric of this country.
So, no—it’s not “just an ad.” It matters. And if the people writing these campaigns haven’t noticed, this generation’s ready to rewrite the story.
Column host Gia Agarwal is an 11th-grader who, when not crushing it in her advanced writing classes, is out there living every book lover's dream. She can be reached at TeenTalk@Khabar.com.
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