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What do jeans and genes have in common? In English, they are homonyms: words that sound identical but mean completely different things. The pun has been used in fashion advertising for decades, sometimes to clever effect, but often with controversial results.

The word jeans comes from Genoa (Gênes in French), an Italian city where a durable cotton cloth was produced in the sixteenth century for work clothes. Later, another sturdy fabric, serge de Nîmes from France, gave rise to the term denim. In the mid-nineteenth century, a German-Jewish immigrant named Levi Strauss arrived in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. He began selling tough trousers made from denim, and in 1873, together with tailor Jacob Davis, patented riveted pants. These became the first blue jeans. Originally designed for miners, Levi’s jeans evolved into a global fashion symbol of youth, rebellion, and style. Unlike most garments of that era, denim has never disappeared. Jeans remain a fabric relic of the nineteenth century, still worn in the twenty-first.

A century later, another company tapped into that enduring popularity. American Eagle Outfitters, founded in 1977, built its identity around casual style and affordable denim, targeting a younger audience. In 2022, the brand chose actor Sydney Sweeney as a global ambassador. Born in 1997, she is known for roles in Euphoria and The White Lotus. The campaign, however, was criticised for celebrating her as having “good genes.” Many argued this implied that her whiteness, blonde hair, and conventional beauty were being presented as superior, echoing troubling ideas of privilege and eugenics.

This was not the first time fashion advertising linked jeans and genes. In the 1980s, Brooke Shields, then fifteen, appeared in Calvin Klein’s infamous “Genes” commercial. The voiceover spoke in the style of a science documentary: “Occasionally certain conditions produce a structural change in the gene which will bring about the process of evolution. Selective mating, in which a single gene type proves superior in transmitting its genes to future generations…” The commercial ended with the punning line: “which brings us to Calvin, and the survival of the fittest: Calvin Klein Jeans.”

These references to “superior genes” reminded many of the eugenics movement. In the early twentieth century, the United States passed sterilisation laws to prevent people considered “unfit” from having children, while similar policies appeared in Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere. The most extreme case came in Nazi Germany, where eugenics fed into racial laws and the Holocaust.

At the same time, real science was moving in a very different direction. In 1953, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin revealed the double helix structure of DNA, showing how genetic information is stored and copied. We now know that species share surprising amounts of DNA: humans and chimpanzees share almost 99 percent, dogs and wolves over 99 percent, and even mushrooms share around half their code with us.

This fascination has become a modern obsession. Millions of people buy ancestry DNA kits to trace their roots and find long-lost relatives. Yet risks remain. In 2023, a massive data breach at 23andMe exposed genetic information from millions of customers, raising concerns about privacy, surveillance, and discrimination.

From Levi Strauss to Sydney Sweeney, from eugenics to DNA testing, the story of jeans and genes shows how fashion and science can unexpectedly overlap in debates about beauty, identity, and belonging.