American Eagle, Are You Okay?
What a “Great Jeans” Joke Tells Us About Organizational Culture, Brand Incongruence, and the Systems That Approve This Stuff
There’s nothing quite like watching a brand regress in real time.
American Eagle just launched a new campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney, an actress whose rising star has been built on complex, emotionally nuanced roles, and decided to boil her value down to a pun:
“She’s got great jeans.”
You heard that right. Jeans. Genes. Haha. Get it? No?
Exactly.
Let’s look beyond the cringe and into the systems that make this kind of messaging not only possible but inevitable. The online chatter has been talking about this being a brand flop. But to me, I’m reading this as a flashing red warning light about cultural misalignment, weak psychological safety, and a brand losing grip on its own evolution.
The Brand That Could’ve Been
A decade ago, American Eagle was riding the high of purpose-driven relevance. Its AerieREAL campaign was an early blueprint for inclusive branding: no retouching, body-positive messaging, real people in real clothes. It was human. It felt different. It worked.
But brands, like organizations, have to keep growing. And that requires cultural sensemaking, not just market chasing.
This ad? It reeks of a room that wanted “viral” more than “values.” Of a team that confused cleverness with impact. Of an environment where saying something provocative replaced saying something meaningful.
OD 101: Culture is What Gets Approved
Let’s bring in Edgar Schein, whose iceberg model of organizational culture is foundational in OD work. He breaks culture down into:
Artifacts (what we see)
Espoused Values (what we say)
Underlying Assumptions (what we believe and act on)
This ad is an artifact. It’s the visible output of deeper systems, assumptions, and decision-making patterns. When a campaign this reductive gets greenlit, we’re seeing more than a creative misstep… we’re seeing a system at work.
And it raises the question: what values were actually at play in that approval chain? Because either:
There weren’t enough diverse perspectives in the room
Psychological safety was too low for dissent
Or someone did raise a flag and got ignored
As Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety reminds us: teams without the ability to challenge, question, and say “this doesn’t feel right” are teams that make preventable mistakes.
Why This Feels Extra Off Right Now
In a time when brands are being asked to do less posturing and more reckoning, this campaign lands like a time capsule from 2004. It’s tone-deaf in an era when people—especially Gen Z—are not just buying clothes, but buying into cultural values.
Research from McKinsey backs this up: “Gen Z expects brands to be inclusive, transparent, and aligned with their own beliefs. They reward authenticity—and punish contradiction.”
So if your brand says empowerment but your campaigns say “lol hot girl,” you’ve got a culture/brand alignment issue.
This is the inside-out problem OD practitioners talk about. You can’t fix culture from the outside in. You have to start with your systems, your values, your decision-making norms, and your leadership courage.
Systemic Symptoms in a Denim Wrapper
This ad signals more than a bad joke. It may signal:
A decision-making culture possibly driven by approval hierarchy over collaborative dissent
A lack of cultural humility or external sensemaking
A creative team possibly operating in an organizational echo chamber
Brands that thrive in today’s environment strive to embody cultural attunement, a term coined by organizational scholars like Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak to describe the capacity to notice, name, and respond to the hidden dynamics shaping behavior.
What would that look like here? It would’ve meant noticing that objectification in the name of humor has a short shelf life, and a long tail of reputational damage.
From Brand Expression to Cultural Exposure
You don’t need to be a culture consultant to feel how off this is. That’s the point. Cultural dissonance is felt, even when it isn’t fully articulated.
This campaign exposed the internal culture at American Eagle more than it showcased their product.
It exposed:
What they think their audience will laugh at
What they believe is “edgy”
And most importantly: what their internal teams are allowed to say out loud
Because when nobody says “Wait… is this really how we want to show up?” that’s not just a creative issue.
That’s a leadership issue.
A systems issue.
A cultural competency issue.
TL;DR: American Eagle, Are You Okay?
Thisis more than just one tone-deaf campaign. It’s about the infrastructure that lets misalignment masquerade as marketing.
If you’re in leadership, comms, or brand: take this as a cautionary tale. Culture isn’t what you claim. It’s what you codify. And when your systems reward “clever” over “considerate,” you’ll start to rot from the inside out.
So, American Eagle. You’ve still got time to course-correct. But it starts with asking harder questions in the rooms where decisions get made.
And maybe, just maybe, leaving the pun work to the middle schoolers.
