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.

Brooke Shields recalls how she was sexualized as a child actor, slams Hollywood for 'eating its young'



Actress Brooke Shields blasted Hollywood for allowing her to be sexualized as a child actor and said the entertainment industry is "predicated on eating its young."

At just 11 years old, Shields made her cinematic debut in the movie "Alice, Sweet Alice." A year later, Shields starred as a child prostitute in the controversial film "Pretty Baby." Shields appeared nude in the movie and kissed 27-year-old actor Keith Carradine.

As a teen, Shields was cast in extremely sexualized roles for "Blue Lagoon" and "Endless Love."

Now, Brooke is speaking out about how she was sexualized by Hollywood when she was a child actor.

On Friday, Shields was joined by journalist Katie Couric, Meghan Markle, sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, and journalist Errin Haines as keynote speakers at a SXSW panel titled: "Breaking Barriers, Shaping Narratives: How Women Lead On and Off the Screen."

"There was this sexualization of young women and I was at the center of it. I was promoting it," Shields said. "I was surrounded by a strong mom, had a community around me, I did not become the type of statistic that Hollywood created."

The 58-year-old actress said, "Hollywood is predicated on eating its young."

She also noted that Hollywood dismisses actresses over the age of 40.

"At 58 you're too old to be the ingénue but not quite the granny yet," Shields stated. "I find my reaction is to instead of getting angry, find and ferret out the filmmakers who appreciate a woman over 40 and appreciate the life experience."

She added, "My entire career has been built on beauty, as I've gotten older I want my message to be appreciative, but beauty as a wellness.... we're not just wrinkle cream. We need to change the narrative – and say that there is beauty in this age."

In her documentary "Pretty Baby," which was released last year, Shields talked to her daughters about being sexually exploited as a child.

Her 19-year-old daughter discussed Brooke posing naked for Playboy at age 10 and appearing nude in a movie at age 11, and exclaimed, "It's child pornography!"

Shields said in an interview, "That was hard for me, to not justify my mom to them, but when they asked me, I thought, 'Oh God, I have to admit this.'"

"I mean, I could say, 'Oh, it was the time back then,' or 'Oh, it was art,'" Shields explained. "But I don't know why she thought it was all right. I don't know."

As Blaze News previously reported, Shields revealed that she was raped by a Hollywood insider early in her acting career.

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Brooke Shields reveals she was raped by a Hollywood insider: 'Stay alive and get out'



Actress Brooke Shields revealed that she was raped by a Hollywood insider early in her acting career. The "Blue Lagoon" actress made the revelation of being a victim of sexual assault in her new documentary "Pretty Baby."

Shields made her cinematic debut at just 11 years old in the movie "Alice, Sweet Alice." A year later, Shields starred as a child prostitute in the controversial film "Pretty Baby." Shields appeared nude in the movie and kissed 29-year-old actor Keith Carradine. As a teen, Shields was cast in sexualized roles for "Blue Lagoon" and "Endless Love."

In 1983, Shields paused her Hollywood career to attend Princeton University. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in Romance languages, she wanted to restart her acting career.

Shields said she had dinner with a Hollywood insider to discuss prospects for her return to acting. The man, who Shields did not identify, convinced her to come back to his hotel room while she waited for a taxi to pick her up.

"And I go up to the hotel room, and he disappears for awhile," Shields said in the new documentary.

Shields recalled that there was nothing to do, so she picked up a pair of binoculars and watched volleyball players outside of the hotel window. The man allegedly returned to the room naked, according to Entertainment Weekly.

"I put the binoculars down and he's right on me," Shields remembered. "Just like, was wrestling."

The actress said she was paralyzed with fear.

"I was afraid I’d get choked out or something," she explained. "So, I didn’t fight that much. I didn't. I just absolutely froze. I thought one 'No' should've been enough, and I just thought, 'Stay alive and get out,' and I just shut it out. God knows I knew how to be disassociated from my body."

She continued, "I went down in the elevator, and I got my own cab. I just cried all the way to my friend's apartment."

Shields said that she didn't process the sex crime attack as a sexual assault for a long time.

She told her security specialist Gavin de Becker about the sexual assault, "He said, 'That's rape.' And I said, 'I'm not willing to believe that.'"

Shields said that she wrote her sexual abuse attacker a letter years later, but it was ignored.

"I just threw my hands up and said, 'You know what, I refuse to be a victim because this is something that happens no matter who you are and no matter what you think you’re prepared for or not,'" the Hollywood actress stated.

"I wanted to erase the whole thing from my mind and body and just keep on the path I was on," she added. "The system had never once come to help me. So, I just had to get stronger on my own."

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World premiere of Hulu documentary 'Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields’ | GMA www.youtube.com



Brooke Shields calls out Barbara Walters for 'practically criminal' teenage interview rife with sexual innuendo



Actress and model Brooke Shields, now 56, said recently that her famous interview with Barbara Walters, which took place in the 1980s when Shields was just a 15-year-old girl, was "practically criminal."

What are the details?

During an interview with Dax Shepard on his "Armchair Expert" podcast, Shields recalled a time during the early '80s when she was particularly uncomfortable during an interview with a woman who was supposed to be an ally.

The 1981 interview took place amid the wildly popular Calvin Klein jeans ad for which Shields became a modeling world staple.

The ad featured a teen Shields asking, "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing."

"I was very naive," Shields said of the sexually charged, double-entendre commercial during an October Vogue interview. "I didn't think it had to do with underwear. I didn't think it was sexual in nature. I'd say that about my sister, nobody could come between me and my sister. ... If they had intended on the double-entendre, they didn't explain it to me. It didn't faze me. It didn't sort of come into my psyche as it being anything overtly sexual, sexualized in anyway."

The televised interview with Walters, however, was a horse of a different color.

During the interview, Walters asked myriad intimate questions about fresh-faced, soft-spoken Shields' body and sexual history, even though she was just 15 years old at the time.

Shields told Shepard that some of the more personally invasive questions included "What are your measurements?" and "Do you have any secrets from your mother?"

"It's practically criminal," she said of Walters' conduct. "It's not journalism."

Shepard agreed, calling it "maddening."

He added that the 1980s media at the time created "competing narratives" about Shields and said that much of the media said that the teen was a "sexual tigress" with "overtly sexual" tendencies, but other media outlets said that the "naive" teen was "being taken advantage of."

Shields agreed and said that those insisting that she was naive were correct.

She added, "They were mad at themselves for not figuring it out and taking it out on me."