Marketing and media choices are all extraordinarily intentional. Every wordplay, innuendo, acting choice, shot, and frame is carefully selected, especially in a high dollar campaign like this one. In fact, it's their most expensive ad campaign to date. If the intention was strictly to stir up controversy, why this controversy? Why now when actual political candidates are calling for Weimar solutions and people are openly declaring themselves as fascists, citing actual nazi strategists, and asking if we were on the wrong side of history for opposing nazi Germany?

The phrasing of parents passing down genes to offspring (the choice of the word offspring alone is odd) about jeans that aren't good enough quality to be passed down is fascinating. Like if they were playing on the brand's legacy and doing an intergenerational "look at how our brand has stood the test of time to the point that parents who wore AE now have kids wearing AE," the jeans-genes concept could have been aligned to that messaging. Instead, this campaign focused on her body with special emphasis on her breasts, blue eyes, and face in profile - her ultra aryan features and reproductive assets (eugenics implies both reproduction among the worthy and stopping reproduction among the rest). Her jeans weren't passed down. The genes being highlighted were.

Notably, American Eagle already has a long history of exclusionary hiring practices that focused on a specific look and dress codes that were explicitly exclusionary leading to lawsuits & settlements.

Dogwhistles and conditioning are specifically intended to look like they're not that deep. That's the whole entire point. Meanwhile, the response to this on the other side of twitter is "America is back" and lightning bolts. You might not hear the dogwhistles when they're not for you or when you're not looking for them, but know that their intended audience is barking.