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Ever since Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle got it so wrong with their jeans ad, it’s been a free-for-all of shade-throwing on the ad campaign front. It started with Beyoncé, who released the final installment in her series of Levi’s commercials about two weeks after the American Eagle campaign was unveiled. Though, thanks to the daily rounds of fresh invective, the AE campaign still felt much more recent (especially by modern standards, when anything more than a day old is “old”) when Beyoncé’s Levi’s commercial dropped. Almost as if she (and Levi’s) were purposefully trying to show them “how it’s done.” And yet, even Beyoncé, often deemed as “ironclad” or “bulletproof” on the instant success front as Taylor Swift, didn’t exactly alight the masses with her campaign. Which, perhaps worse than saying something “incendiary,” said nothing much at all.
Thus, when Gap emerged with its own “little response” (whether admitting that it was a response or not) to the whole jeans controversy in mid-August, they decided to say it best by saying it with Katseye (don’t worry if you hadn’t heard of them until now) bopping around amongst many other dancers to the tune of Kelis’ signature 2003 hit, “Milkshake.” Which apparently feels as “fresh” and “relevant” to the youths of today as it did to the millennials of yore (particularly after the song cameo’d in 2004’s Mean Girls). And, on a side note, it would seem Kelis takes less issue with the song being used to sell denim than she does with it being used to sell Beyoncé herself. Or, more specifically, her music. For who could forget Kelis’ none too favorable reaction to “Mrs. Carter” sampling “Milkshake” for track four of Renaissance, “Energy”? So unfavorable was the reaction, in fact, that Beyoncé “quietly” just removed the sample the same way she removed the phrase “Spazzin’ on that ass” from “Heated” (replacing it with a perhaps even more suggestive phrase: “Blastin’ on that ass”).
But there’s nothing “quiet” about the reanimation of “Milkshake” in 2025, the year when the saturation of 00s pop culture has reached an ostensible new apex, even though few thought that could be possible after Euphoria makeup and the remake of Mean Girls in 2024. But no, 2025 is gunning hard for the 00s to come back (even in terms of Lindsay Lohan making her own umpteenth “return” with Freakier Friday, released the same year, incidentally, as “Milkshake”).
Ironically enough, however, the 00s were a prime time for white supremacy. Reigning truly “supreme” in that no one was talking about the surfeit of whiteness in media at the time. Or the fact that someone like Jennifer Lopez or Lucy Liu was about as “exotic” as Hollywood was willing to get in film, music or any other entertainment medium. That lack of representation, it was all just accepted. Taken at face value. And this is part of why Sweeney and American Eagle (itself a brand very much associated with the 00s, along with Abercrombie & Fitch) might be the most “authentically” 00s of all in that they unleashed an ad campaign that assumes the presence of a customer mindset that truly is still “locked in” with that era.
The era when the blonde girl with the “‘hot’ body” (to borrow a phrase from Janis Ian’s [Lizzy Caplan] chalkboard plan on how to take down Regina George) was never to be questioned, made fun of and certainly not accused of promoting white supremacy with a dubious tag line (“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”) that was paired with an even more suggestive commercial “monologue” (“Genes are passed down to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color… My jeans are blue”).
Thus, the Katseye x Gap campaign stood out even more by not only calling upon 00s semiotics and sounds, but also adhering to what the tenets of capitalism do best by repackaging what’s old, making it “new” again and selling it back to the masses. And since Gap commercials at their most successful are always known for the “all-white backdrop,” this latest one hit all the right notes of nostalgia. Considering that’s about the only thing everyone can afford to get high on now, it’s being ramped up all the more with each passing year.
Hence, Addison Rae, a Gen Zer who clearly identifies as a millennial, also getting in on the 00s nostalgia action with her own ad campaign for Lucky Brand Jeans—an ultra 00s-associated brand. Accordingly, Women’s Wear Daily described the jeans she’s promoting as “a reimagined version of a look from Lucky Brand’s early 2000s archive.” What’s more, Addison rolled her sleeves (or is it cuffs in this case?) even further up by actually getting involved in the design process by serving as creative director for this specific line of ultra low-rise flare jeans. That fit, of course, being the pinnacle of 00s-era fashion, with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears exemplifying the trend in the early aughts.
As for Addison’s “commercial” (directed by Mitch Ryan), it didn’t go quite as viral as Gap’s (directed by Bethany Vargas, whose most recent credits include the likes of Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra” video). Though there is still something like “choreo” in the mix after it opens with Addison walking out onto a stage area in her Lucky Brand Jeans as her own song, “High Fashion,” plays (obviously not as instantly recognizable as “Milkshake”). Right from the beginning, the tag line, “Wear Lucky, feel lucky” immediately pops up. And it isn’t lost on any millennial girl that one of Britney’s biggest hits in the early 00s was “Lucky.” Or that she herself was a wearer of Lucky Brand (along with all the other fashion “staples” of the day: Tommy Hilfiger, Abercrombie, Ed Hardy, Juicy Couture, etc.).
The visual comparison to Britney that “AR” continues to draw was not lost on anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of the 00s. And yet, despite Spears being everyone’s favorite reference, in the denim wars that have taken the U.S. by storm since July, it seems that Katseye is the clear winner of this round. Even if Addison’s campaign has a level of finesse, class and vague freshness beyond the mere regurgitation of a milkshake that boasts, “I know you want it/The thing that makes me/What the guys go crazy for/They lose their minds.”
And what guys and girls alike are all losing their minds for this year is 00s stylings, whether in the world of fashion or otherwise. Though someone might want to remind them all that this particular decade was nothing if not pro-white supremacy. But try telling that to a generation that’s somehow managed to romanticize George W. Bush a.k.a. make “Bushcore” happen.
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Genna Rivieccio
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