It’s perhaps the sharpest of marketing’s double-edged swords: brands quest endlessly for attention, but aren’t always happy with the sort of attention they get.

The last two weeks have served up a textbook example of this paradox—actress Sydney Sweeney’s coquettish series of ads for American Eagle Outfitters, which turned a lot of heads and also curled a lot of lips. 

It was one specific ad that did it. In a stylistic invocation of Brooke Shields’ famous 1980 ads for Calvin Klein jeans, Sweeney slipped into her denims while talking to the camera about the importance of having good jeans. 

Or was it genes? Actually, it was both. And the brand’s willingness to slip suggestively between those two homophones prompted some to charge it with espousing debunked theories around racial superiority and waxing nostalgic for eugenics.

Hindsight is a blessing in cases like this, of course, and you don’t need a lot of it. American Eagle launched the ad, pulled the ad, then issued a statement explaining the ad—all within a nine-day period.

In this episode of Adspeak, Adweek editor-in-chief Ryan Joe and senior editor Robert Klara discuss the Sweeney conflagration with the benefit of the embers having been (mostly) extinguished. It’s an opportunity to ask some questions that felt too big for the heat of the moment. Among them:  Why were so many people so upset, anyway? Was the Sweeney campaign a victim of public anger, or was it courting it? And what does the campaign tell us about the historic role of controversy itself?