Teen retailer American Eagle Outfitters has a message to its critics, who took issue over its denim ad campaign with 27-year-old actor Sydney Sweeney that sparked a debate over race and Western beauty standards. The campaign, the retailer said, was always about the jeans.

In a statement posted on American Eagle’s Instagram account on Friday, the retailer said the ad campaign “is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.”

The message marked the first time the teen retailer responded to days of backlash since the ad with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” launched last week.

In the run-up to the ad blitz, the company’s chief marketing officer told trade media outlets that it included “clever, even provocative language” and was “definitely going to push buttons.”

It’s unclear if the company knew how much controversy the ad could raise.

Most of the negative reception focused on videos that used the word “genes” instead of “jeans” when discussing the blonde-haired, blue-eyed actor known for the HBO series “Euphoria” and “White Lotus.”

Critics found the most troubling was a teaser video in which Sweeney says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”

The video appeared on American Eagle’s Facebook page and other social media channels but is not part of the ad campaign.

Some critics saw the wordplay as a nod, either unintentional or deliberate, to eugenics, a discredited theory that held humanity could be improved through selective breeding for certain traits.

Other commenters accused detractors of reading too much into the campaign’s message. Some marketing experts said the buzz is always good even if it’s not uniformly positive.

“If you try to follow all the rules, you’ll make lots of people happy, but you’ll fail,” Allen Adamson, co-founder of marketing consultancy Metaforce said. “The rocket won’t take off.”

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