In 2024, consumers (specifically Gen Z and millennials) went feral for celebrity-driven campaigns.
Take 32-time Grammy Award winner and global icon Beyoncé, for example. Her highly anticipated album “Cowboy Carter” not only topped the charts but also fueled a blockbuster campaign with Levi’s.
Launched in September 2024, the collaboration generated more than 4.3 billion impressions and over $65 million in estimated earned media value (EMV) by April 2025. Combined with the release of her viral track “Levii’s Jeans” last March, Levi’s reported a 12 percent boost in net revenue and a 44 percent surge in net income to $183 million by the end of Q4 2024, according to the company’s earnings report.
Courtesy of Levi’s
Country music star Lainey Wilson followed suit. Riding the momentum of her album “Whirlwind,” she dropped her first collab collection with Wrangler which became the brand’s most successful global collaboration.
Meanwhile, Charli XCX’s chart-topping album “Brat” marked a cultural reset in both music and fashion. The rule breaker revived the indie sleaze aesthetic, brought club culture back into focus and toppled Clean Girl minimalism with her simple (yet effective) lime-green album cover.
Heather Ibberson, retail analyst at EDITED tracked the ripple effect, noting “Lime green apparel arrivals were low within retailers’ Spring 2024 collections. However, we saw a 171-percent spike in June 2024 vs. 2023 when the album launched, and fans used the slime hue to signal their Brat girl status.”
Charli XCX’s influence translated into sales, too. For example, Her Skims cotton rib collection campaign reached a 35 percent majority sell-out rate—meaning more than half of SKUs sold out—within its first three months in the U.S., while her collaborations with Acne Studios generated an estimated $1.5 million in media mentions in its first 48 hours, a figure “significantly higher than other campaigns during the same period,” according to Launchmetrics data.
So, if celebrity campaigns sparked cultural moments and measurable returns last year, why aren’t they striking the same chord in 2025?
Well, according to Stacy Jones, founder and CEO of pop culture marketing agency Hollywood Branded, it’s because “consumers are savvier now.”
“Last year’s multi-collaborations felt exciting because they were fresh combinations. This year, the saturation is showing. People are asking, ‘Does this star actually care about this brand?’,” Jones told SJ Denim. “There’s a fatigue factor, but it’s also a demand for deeper storytelling. The campaigns that will resonate moving forward are the ones that go beyond a single ad and actually create experiences or narratives people want to be part of.”
If there was one campaign that showed just how tricky the formula has become, it was American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign.
Courtesy
While AE’s president and executive creative director Jennifer Foyle said the goal was to add “a little mischief” to the company’s marketing strategy, it instead sparked an online uproar.
In one video, Sweeney delivers a mock science lesson, stating “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color…my jeans are blue,” she says, playing on both the denim she’s wearing and her own blue eyes. The clip then cuts to a voiceover saying “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
“The creative was clever, but it lacked layers. It relied too heavily on a single pun without the cultural scaffolding that [others] have built, [leaving] it more vulnerable to backlash and interpretation instead of universal resonance,” Jones said. “The partnership wasn’t necessarily wrong…but without diversification across talent or storytelling, the weight fell entirely on her shoulders, making the campaign easier to critique.”
AI-powered geospatial insights company Pass_by reported that AE’s in-store traffic decline accelerated in the wake of the controversy. For the week of Aug. 3–9, visits were down 8.96 percent year-over-year, following a 3.9 percent drop the previous week.
That’s not to say the campaign didn’t generate attention, though.
In fact, the move actually sparked a surge in online conversation, with daily mentions of the brand jumping from an average of 67 to 33,000, according to Marketplace Analytics Platform Systems (Maps).
“This isn’t just a debate about denim; it’s a discussion about identity, belonging, power and status,” Hillary Herskowitz, founder and CEO of H2 Marketing Group, told SJ Denim. “[Consumers] continue to engage with it because controversy gives us a sense of control (especially when sharing our opinions)… but that doesn’t always translate to sales or increased foot traffic like we saw [with AE].”
With backlash mounting, AE eventually addressed the criticism in an Instagram post, clarifying that the 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.”
But the saga didn’t end there. Today, AE announced a limited-edition collaboration with Tru Kolors by Travis Kelce—dropping just one day after the NFL star and global icon Taylor Swift revealed their engagement. The collection, which AE said has been more than a year in the making, was positioned as an extension of Kelce’s sportswear and lifestyle brand built on connection and self-expression.
Still, the timing is already drawing criticism. One TikTok user wrote, “Oh. Um… how did we go from hearing the most exciting and happy news yesterday to Travis supporting a company that ran a eugenics campaign? I’m not ok with this.” Another added, “As someone who studied advertising…these things take MONTHS if not years to come out. This is just snaky timing on AE’s end.”
“Signing on Travis Kelce isn’t so much a pivot as it is an expansion. He, no doubt, is part of the long-term effort to turn the campaign toward men’s clothing,” Baruch Labunski, CEO at digital marketing firm Rank Secure, told SJ Denim. “He is a good choice because he is a well-known football celebrity now engaged to Taylor Swift, who is incredibly popular with the target group of young women. In fact, the engagement announcement is almost too perfectly timed with the announcement of this . Timing had to be coordinated.”
Courtesy
Calvin Klein (CK) is in the same boat as AE.
While the PVH-owned brand managed to avoid controversy this time—unlike its infamous 1980 ad starring 15-year-old Brooke Shields declaring “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins”—its latest effort still failed to resonate, Jones noted.
Earlier this month, Calvin Klein unveiled its Fall 2025 denim collection with a campaign fronted by Mingyu of K-pop group Seventeen. Unfortunately, the drop landed on the very same day Gap launched its headline-grabbing Katseye campaign.
“Dropping the Seventeen campaign the same day as Gap’s Katseye ad meant the attention economy was already spoken for,” Jones said. “Timing is everything, and Calvin’s push didn’t feel differentiated enough to cut through. It shows how even big brands with history can fail to spark conversation if they don’t align creative, timing and cultural context.”
Herskowitz agreed, adding that Calvin Klein has spent decades chasing the shock value of its most controversial campaigns but “keeps missing.”
“The Seventeen campaign felt like going through the motions rather than having something to say,” she said.
Courtesy
In contrast, Gap was striking gold.
Gap’s “Better in Denim” fall campaign starring rising global girl group Katseye was a unanimous hit.
The concept positions denim as a blank canvas for individuality and freedom of movement. All six Katseye members appear in head-to-toe denim, dancing with high energy to Kelis’s early-2000s hit “Milkshake.”
Like AE’s Sydney Sweeney ad, Gap’s campaign went viral—but this time for positive reasons.
As of today, the commercial had racked up more than 40.1 million views on Gap’s Instagram account and 3.9 million likes on TikTok, where fans are busy re-creating the dance. Launchmetrics also reported that the Katseye campaign reached an EMV of $1.7 million shortly after its launch, quickly becoming its most viral campaign.
One Instagram commenter captured the online mood: “I can’t wait to tell my children about the great denim wars of 2025,” to which another replied, “There is no war…Gap clocked AE fair and square.”
“Star power alone isn’t enough anymore. If it feels transactional, audiences tune out. Katseye work[s] because they’re believable extensions of the brands,” Jones said. “Denim is foundational in fashion, but when every brand is trying to own the same cultural spotlight in the same season, the noise drowns out weaker executions. That’s why Gap…broke through while American Eagle and Calvin Klein struggled to cut through.”
Levi’s, which recently launched a campaign starring country/pop star Shaboozey, is another brand managing to keep customers hooked.
According to Levi Strauss & Co.’s April earnings update, the company generated $1.53 billion in sales for the first quarter—up 3 percent on a reported basis and 9 percent on an organic basis versus Q1 2024. In Q2 of 2025, Levi’s reported $1.4 billion in sales and a 6 percent uplift in net revenue. CEO Michelle Gass even stated during a recent earnings call that “The Levi’s brand has never been stronger.”
“Gap and Levi’s share some common elements that work for them,” Labunski said. “Both lean on music and lifestyle storytelling rather than putting a single celebrity at the center. The ads feel authentic, and that matters—especially to Gen Z, which statistically doesn’t care as much about brands as it does about authenticity. That’s why Levi’s and Gap are connecting, while others are [struggling to get traction].”