Fresh off of selling a limited-edition soap that contained a dose of her actual bathwater, Sydney Sweeney took on a starring role in a denim campaign for fashion brand American Eagle. The new collection includes the “Sydney Jean,” produced in collaboration with the actress. It features a butterfly motif that represents domestic violence awareness, and 100 percent of the purchase price of the product goes to a crisis hotline.
If you weren’t aware of that bit of philanthropy, it’s probably because reactions to the new ads were entirely focused on their political resonance, not the clothes. To some on the right, the casting of a blonde, blue-eyed, buxom celebrity in jeans commercials signaled the death of “woke” advertising and a return to the conventional wisdom of old Madison Avenue. Some liberals and leftists, meanwhile, were perturbed by the scripted lines Sweeney utters in one of the spots,as she lounges in her denim: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” she says. “My jeans are blue.” The tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The curious pun read to critics as a dog whistle for white supremacy, eugenics, and fascism in Trump‘s America — a wink to Sweeney’s correspondence to an Aryan archetype.
One group heard both of those responses to the viral ads and detected an opportunity. That would be the meme-stock investors, traders with Robinhood accounts who buy into brands not based on economic outlook, but vibes. Their most famous exploit was the short squeeze of stock in the video game retailer GameStop in January 2021, though they have also tried to drive up the price of companies including AMC and BlackBerry, occasionally pulling off significant rallies. As it happens, they’ve successfully pumped several struggling stocks in the past week, including Krispy Kreme and Kohl’s, but saw a volatile cycle of gains and losses typical for this collective market mania. To the meme-stock community, the polarizing reaction to Sweeney’s ads was a signal to also invest in American Eagle, since it meant that — good or bad — people were talking about the chain. (Although a few traders on Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets confirmed that Sweeney’s sex appeal factored into their investment.) The stock rose about 25 percent on Wednesday last week, the day the campaign debuted.
Since then, shares have dipped a bit, yet the meme-stock crowd still appears to believe that they can juice the outrage (and the corresponding conservative mockery of this backlash) to make good on their speculation. “The Sydney Sweeney / American Eagle $AEO backlash by those taking issue with the ad is causing the Streisand Effect of amplifying the marketing campaign for free,” claimed the financial commentator @ParrotCapital in an X post on Monday, sharing screenshots of corporate executives and communications specialists condemning the Sweeney clips as offensive. (The Streisand Effect is a term describing how attempts to neutralize unfavorable internet content actually make it more visible.) Elsewhere on the platform, an investor posted a graph showing American Eagle’s rising stock price, writing, “Can more liberal woman please post their thoughts on $AEO…. We are almost there!” On Tuesday, an investment YouTuber shared a video of a woman exhorting viewers to boycott the brand. “Bullish $AEO as people recognize how stupid these people are and buy shit to distance themselves from the stupidity,” he declared. One X user shared a similar TikTok of a woman calling the commercial “white supremacy propaganda,” saying it had convinced him to buy stock.
Others tried to look for actual evidence that the Gen Z Sweeney would boost sales among her generation, which is a key customer base for American Eagle. They weren’t disappointed. Some new items sold out within 48 hours of the ads hitting social media, with website traffic doubling in the same period. In-store foot traffic was up nine percent, according Solink and Shopify analytics tools. Even so, the core of meme-stock strategy is a reliance on reading the cultural crosswinds to predict the natural outcome of the zeitgeist. On that front, traders seemed to side with right-wing figures — Sen. Ted Cruz among them — who rolled their eyes at the outcry from anti-MAGA folks. Indeed, in the short but wild history of meme-driven market forces, this may be the first stock craze specifically predicated on “triggering the libs,” riding a wave of resentment from ideological opponents. “Free advertising by liberals ALWAYS works!” wrote a Trump supporter in an X post on Tuesday, sharing a chart of the rising $AEO stock price.
The overall effect so far appears to invert a trend from 2023, when several brands, beginning with Bud Light, were targeted for boycotts by conservatives for marketing that celebrated racial and LGBTQ diversity. A number of influencers also favorably compared the Sweeney-led campaign to inclusive American Eagle materials from years past that featured models with a broad range of body types. Radio host Glenn Beck did so on his show, saying that the new campaign was “recognizing the American man again,” insofar as Sweeney is “on a lot of people’s ‘I Wish I Had That Gal’ list.”
Whether the genes/jeans concept was just a case of accidental insensitivity, a deliberate provocation in a charged political climate, or something more nefarious, there’s no denying that it got massive attention by cutting through the digital noise, and that was surely by design. (The company, however, did not respond to a request for comment.) The question is how long the controversy can last after the first week of takes — and it won’t be a surprise if the meme-stock investors look to keep stirring the pot in hopes of a tidy profit. Of course, some of them are simply in it for spite. As a r/wallstreetbets redditor put it in a recent thread on $AEO’s potential, “I just like to piss off fucking woke people.” In this economy, that’s apparently what passes for financial advice.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
From Rolling Stone US
