Susan Scafidi, founder and director of Fordham Law’s Fashion Law Institute, spoke with Women’s Wear Daily about the controversy over whether American Eagle’s campaign with actress Sydney Sweeney this summer knocked off the Hudson Jeans campaign with model Georgia May Jagger in 2009.
Susan Scafidi, founder and director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham University, said, “Assuming that the Sydney B. Sweeney, [who is]registered as a Republican in Florida is indeed the same person, party operatives are probably already imagining a red, white and blue ‘genes’ campaign ad.“
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To that point, Hudson Jeans’ 2009 campaign with the baby-faced adolescent Jagger was compared by some to Calvin Klein’s controversial campaign with Brooke Shields in 1981.
Scafidi said AEO’s “rather slow response strategically kept its name in the news, and then threaded the needle between progressive outrage and right-wing defense of the model and mockery of the left.” She said, “By refocusing on the product — the jeans — and implicitly claiming that its reuse of an old pun is unworthy of widespread cultural analysis rather than either apologizing for or defending its ad, AE chose to appeal to the many, who are tired of extreme partisan politics.”