American Eagle is back with Syd and not sorry about it

FastCompany: “What brand am I wearing?” Sydney Sweeney says, looking into the camera as the shutter snaps, revealing a rotation of summery denim looks. The mood suddenly calms, her eyes close, she takes a deep breath, seagulls call in the background. “Yeah, that one,” she says with a giggle.

The ad marks the return of one of the most notorious brand partnerships in recent memory, as American Eagle launches a new campaign to hype its denim shorts called “Syd for Short.” It’s a perfectly pleasant, perfectly innocuous piece of brand work meant to conjure the free-spiritedness of summertime (and, you know, maybe make you forget about—or at least move on from—the last time Sweeney hawked jeans for the retailer). When I saw the new work, I knew I needed to talk to American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers about it.

Brommers steered the brand through last year’s drama, when the internet turned Sweeney’s “Great Jeans” spot into a cultural lightning rod. He tells me the new campaign has two primary goals: First, and unsurprisingly, it wants to start a new chapter in the brand’s Sweeney partnership. Second, it wants to offer the Gen Z audience a break from all the noise that’s aimed its way. “The world is pretty noisy right now. Social media creates noise, geopolitical issues create noise, and Gen Z talks about their mental health challenges and how that’s creating noise for them,” Brommers says.

Conversely, he says, the ad is about “turning down the external noise, embracing who you really are, and then being able to live your life, especially in this season—summer—that Gen Z looks forward to the most all year.” The mellow vibe provides an intentional contrast to last year’s campaign. Where “Great Jeans” saw Sweeney tapping into a more straight-faced, sultry version of herself, here Syd is all easy smiles and playful laughs. American Eagle knows as well as anyone that ads can create noise, too, and it’s using this moment to take a quieter approach.

As far as I know, there’s no marketing manual for how to follow up an advertising campaign that much of the internet interpreted as eugenics propaganda dressed up like a pervy old Calvin Klein commercial . Do you lean into provocation? Do you play it safe? Do you ditch your tainted celeb spokesperson altogether? With “Syd for Short,” American Eagle is betting on something it believes will pay off in the long run: brand consistency.

Brand noise The waves of headlines labeling last year’s American Eagle ad racist dog whistling, combined with the counter waves declaring that reaction “woke” nonsense, caught the brand itself in the middle of that noise. Noise, mind you, that boosted the company’s customer base by 700,000, helped its 2025 Q3 revenue jump by 1% after two previously slumping quarters, and has since attracted 56 billion impressions, according to Brommers. But in the midst of that storm around the brand, there were decisions to be made.

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This campaign represents a significant shift in American Eagle's branding strategy, leveraging a popular figure to connect with Gen Z, which is highly relevant for brand strategy professionals.