In a world of brand commercials relying on celebrities to sell their clothes for them, GAP has been known for their over-the-top dance advertisements. With groovy past commercials featuring artists and dancers like Missy Elliott and Madonna, Troye Sivan, Tyla and JUNGLE and others, this past August’s advertisement featured global pop girl group KATSEYE dancing to Kelis’ 2003 pop single Milkshake while showing off GAP’s new line of lowrise jeans. In just 2 weeks, KATSEYE’s GAP ad has received over 400 million views and 8 billion impressions across all platforms, having just premiered on August 19th of this year.
But every clothing brand has their own unique way of advertising; GAP is dancing as Nike is athletes, so on and so fourth. American Eagle’s way of getting their message across was to hire famous American actress Sydney Sweeney. The idea was to play on the “genes/jeans” homograph. Sydney goes on to explain essentially how genes work and how they are passed down. The ad ends with “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”. But of course, the internet being the internet, immediately jumped to conclusions and began the name calling. The majority thought that the ad had undertones of white supremacy and racism, saying Sydney Sweeney has the superior genes (white skin, blue eyes and blonde hair). It obviously didn’t perform well when the accusations came, so much to the point that American Eagle had to hire a “crisis manager” to handle the situation. Saying, “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.’”, but TikTok was still ablaze. Fortunately, GAP came through to show American Eagle how it was done.
The main reason everybody felt like KATSEYE’s GAP collab had such a massive impact was because of the inclusivity of the girl group members and all of the backup dancers, all people involved in the advertisement are people of color, as opposed to the one-woman-show that was the AE ad.
Senior Chloe Elguira shared her perspective, explaining, “I think that the KATSEYE ad was much more modern and hits the mark better just cause they’re a new girl group and I think that they’re more relevant than Sydney Sweeney. GAP had such a good idea when they had them dance versus Sydney Sweeney just talking about jeans and genes.” While others had similar opinions, senior Aaliyah Ford says “I mean as a long time fan of KATSEYE, naturally I was like ‘Oh they ate that,’ and I mean I thought that the Sydney Sweeney ad was just awkward.”
On the bright side, after American Eagle managing to miss the mark and unimpress half of America with their jeans/genes campaign, sales boosted about 25% in the end. And what’s ironic is that KATSEYE was originally American Eagle’s official ambassadors when they first debuted. So this raises the question: where did American Eagle successfully drop the ball?
