american eagle commercials

As I was reading McBride’s “Why I Hate Abercrombie” I questioned myself if commercials really do portray the “all American look” and in the short time between reading the article and doing some homework I saw about 5 commercials that fit the same standards as McBride discusses. And that is why I decided to use these commercials as a media device. One of the commercials was for American Eagle, one of A & F’s competitors, although I was unable to find the exact commercial I saw on television. I did find two other American Eagle commercials on YouTube that work just as well to convey my point.




For one the sheer name; American Eagle denotes that the company is all about America and excluding those who don’t belong, and on another point the clothes probably aren’t even made in the US. The first commercial I have posted has a bunch of young people, probably in their 20’s, playing volleyball on the beach. Just this scene makes me think of what McBride said on page 66; “Abercrombie has worked hard to produce a brand strongly associated with a young, white, upper-class, leisure lifestyle.” Abercrombie has a quarterly that emanates this image and American Eagle has used a commercial to do so. It is very evident that everyone is white in the commercial, with the exception of the girl with a darker complexion, which is probably just a tan anyway. Everyone is out on the beach having a good- old time, the “leisure lifestyle” and more than likely they are in the upper class category. Being in good financial standing would be the only way these young adults would be able to take a day off of work or school, whatever the situation may be.

I had to find a second commercial to corroborate both McBride’s positions and mine. I had to see if the advertisements really are supposed to give the label an “all American” underlying factor. The second commercial just has two white, young lovers driving to, guess what, a beach. Both commercials take place on a deserted and serene beach and neither of the two had any people of color in them, which gives off the impression that only young white kids can go to the beach, making that underlying factor of being “all American” come forward.





Another one of McBride’s statements really jumped out at me, “there are those who will not grasp, or will feign confusion about grasping, the coded nature of the whiteness that A & F so clearly employs.” (76). This sentence embodies our whole culture, people either really don’t see how advertisements are affecting us or they just pretend that they don’t.
I was surprised that I could actually see what McBride said about A & F in something I see everyday. I really can’t believe that our world is still thinking in the ideals of white privilege, after all the civil rights movements and such and our society still can’t except a black man as “all American.”