Hot is no longer toxic, and the normies are back.

D id you know that a popular retailer is using ads for jeans to revive the Third Reich? Pretty sneaky, right? 

Except they aren’t. They’re just selling jeans the old-fashioned way — by selling aspiration rather than activism. 

American Eagle Outfitters, long a market share leader in women’s denim, launched a series of ads you’ve been reading and hearing about nonstop for the last week. The ads, as you know, feature Sydney Sweeney — the “it girl” known for her roles in HBO’s Euphoria and The White Lotus, as well as her curves, which she flaunts unabashedly — lounging and strutting in head-to-toe denim. 

The campaign uses a play on words to describe Sweeney’s jeans: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue,” she says in the ad. 

Sometimes a pun is just a pun. 

In my 30-year career as a marketer and maker of jeans — eight of them spent as the chief marketing officer for Levi’s — I’ve been pitched a similar campaign with the exact same pun more times than I can count on two hands. I never ran it. It just seemed too obvious. 

But in an age of ads featuring morbidly obese and hairy-chested “nonbinary” people lounging around in jeans and underwear, this cliché feels fresh — if only because Sweeney is hot. After all, when old becomes new again, it’s always about context. Mom jeans and dad shoes became cool because of the irony, not because anyone actually wants to look like their mom. 

And in the age of unwieldy wokeness, hot blondes are a breakthrough idea. 

There are echoes of Calvin Klein’s Brooke Shields campaign from 1981, where Shields also talked about her good genes. While wriggling into a super-tight pair of designer jeans, the (very) young model and actress said: “The secret of life lies hidden in the genetic code. Genes are fundamental in determining the characteristics of an individual and passing on these characteristics to succeeding generations.” 

In another, better-known ad from the same campaign, Shields seductively uttered: “You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” 

But Shields was 15. Sweeney is 27. And Sweeney is fully dressed — not wriggling into or out of her clothes. None of the American Eagle ads actually show much skin. The jeans aren’t tight — certainly not as tight as Beyoncé’s in the recent Levi’s ads. And — this is the best part — Sweeney seems in on the joke. In one of the ads, she looks directly at the camera and says, “Eyes up here” (meaning: not on my chest). 

So, what’s to complain about? 

Everything, according to white-liberal-lady TikTok. We’ve been subjected to endless streams of car videos telling us how downright clueless — or worse, evil — we are if we don’t see what is happening here. According to these women who love telling us all what to think, Hitler is cheering from the grave. 

One social media user lamented: “The American Eagle ad wasn’t just a commercial. It was a love letter to white nationalism and eugenic fantasies.” 

Another told us: “Praising Sydney Sweeney for her great genes in the context of her white, blonde-hair, blue-eyed appearance — it is one of the loudest and most obvious racialized dog whistles we’ve seen and heard in a while.”  

Yet another bottle blonde complains that the ad was “clearly centered for the male gaze, but it’s targeted for female customers.” But then she appears confused as to why the jeans were baggy, saying: “Why didn’t they pick jeans that she would fill out?” 

So is it too sexy, or not sexy enough? 

Here’s the thing: These ads look pretty much like every jeans ad from the ’80s and ’90s. 

Heck, half the ads that weren’t for jeans looked like this. American Eagle Outfitters need only to have looked up the Pepsi Super Bowl commercial from 1992, featuring supermodel Cindy Crawford at a gas station in jean shorts, for inspiration. 

Or one of my very first Levi’s ads in my 23 years at the company, featuring Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Daniela Pestova in an ad for cutoff jean shorts — where the model is seen laying her jeans on train tracks to make them into shorts. The biggest complaint we got on that one was that there needed to be a safety warning — “Don’t do this at home” — because train tracks are dangerous. 

The good news amid all the complaining from the wokesters: neither American Eagle Outfitters nor Sweeney has issued an apology. American Eagle merely acknowledged the bellyaching with an Instagram post that ends with: “Great Jeans Look Great on Everyone.” 

Then President Trump praised Sweeney, and the American Eagle stock surged 24 percent in one day. In 2016, if Trump praised a brand, the brand would have groveled to its fans for forgiveness. 

In the same way that people who mask in public today look ridiculous (I mean, they kind of always did, though, right?), the wokesters screeching on TikTok about eugenics in a jeans ad also look ridiculous. They haven’t gotten the memo. 

Hot is no longer toxic. The normies are back. And everyone normal knows that a beautiful woman talking about her genes — or her jeans — is delivering a dad-joke-style pun, not a secret Nazi salute.