Hot girls and denim: American Eagle rediscovers a winning formula

Youth retailer American Eagle just launched a new ad campaign featuring “it girl” Sydney Sweeney from “Euphoria” — and her well-endowed fame is turning heads and shaping markets. The campaign launch, featuring the bombshell known for her curves, drove the stock up 15% in a single day.

Whatever American Eagle paid Sweeney, it was worth it. The company’s market cap jumped $400 million in one day following a 47% decline in its stock price last year. After years of hawking body positivity, it appears “hot girl summer” is once again the way to go.

American Eagle is back, reignited by the formula as old as advertising itself: Sexy sells.

The idea that hot girls leaning on muscle cars sell jeans — or anything else, for that matter — is nothing revolutionary in the ad world. Who could forget Pepsi’s 1992 ad featuring Cindy Crawford at the gas station in jeans and a white tank top? No Gen Xer on the planet could forget this ad. It was iconic — and effective.

Bringing sexy back

American Eagle’s newest campaign is a major about-face after more than a decade of jeans, car, and beer brands forcing wokeness down our gullets. Ultimately, sex sells. And pretty girls with sexy stares can sell everything from men’s deodorant to the WNBA — if only they had more Sophie Cunninghams!

Calvin Klein jeans made sexy their stock-in-trade over 40 years ago. In 1980, the premium jeans brand gave us Brooke Shields seductively whispering, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

She was 15, and it was both sordid and problematic. But it ushered in decades of “hot girls in jeans” advertising. From Kate Moss naked from the waist up in Calvin Klein jeans to Anna Nicole Smith doing her best Marilyn Monroe impression for Guess, the formula worked.

Abercrombie & Fitch gave sexy a twist with preppy hot girls and guys — shirtless — in black-and-white Bruce Weber photography. CEO Mike Jeffries was so obsessed with sexy that the brand was sued for hiring only good-looking people as sales associates in their stores.

Man boobs don’t sell

Then wokeness tightened its grip on corporate America. Sexy was out. Dylan Mulvaney cosplaying as Audrey Hepburn drinking Bud Light and overweight, nonbinary, hairy-chested men in bras and Calvin Klein jeans were in.

But the public didn’t buy it. Literally.

Bud Light’s partnership with Mulvaney in 2023 sparked a historic backlash. The brand plummeted from America’s best-selling beer to number three. Its market share tanked, and sales have declined more than 20% annually since.

RELATED: Go woke, go MEGA broke — this luxury company’s sales just plummeted 97%

Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Walking back woke

But after years of brand-destroying body positivity, the remnants of normies at American Eagle took the wheel, and their sales and stock price soared. The brand is back, reignited by the formula as old as advertising itself: Sexy sells. Always has, always will.

Even Nike seems to be walking back its own woke phase. Just last week, the company ran a series of ads with U.S. Open winner Scottie Scheffler touting family values.

Another adage permeates advertising: Always include a cutaway shot of either a dog, a baby, or both. Cuteness, like hotness, sells. And nothing is cuter than golf champ Scheffler holding his baby.

Nike’s ad campaign with Scheffler comes on the heels of the company’s previous campaign with Dylan Mulvaney in a sports bra — without any boobs at all. Are we to believe that Nike has shed its wokeness? I think what’s more likely is that Nike was never woke to begin with.

Nike’s mantra is money. And execs will abandon Mulvaney as fast as you can say, “Just do it,” if it means reversing their sales decline and pleasing their shareholders.

Reigniting the normies

As Clay Travis famously put it, “The only two things I 100% believe in are the First Amendment and boobs.” We can gasp and pretend this is a controversial statement. But Travis only said what we all know to be true: Boobs are a reliable winner. Breast augmentation surgeries have experienced a compound annual growth rate of 13% per year since 2020 for a reason.

American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney campaign is not remotely “body positive,” and that’s a good thing. It pays. And I predict other brands will take note.

Returning to normie marketing means brands can advertise normal ideas to normal people without feeling bad about it any more. And we can let it wash over us in all of its visual pleasantness.

Expect a wave of ad campaigns in which marketers quietly memory-hole the failed “body positivity” experiment and return to what actually works. The brands chasing social justice won’t say it out loud, but they’re breathing a collective sigh of relief.