Unpaid content btw.
Good morning say it back… If you’ve been blissfully offline or immersed in PFW madness and missed the guerrilla GUESS JEANS campaign that has been derailing the internet and LA billboards alike, allow us to catch you up. The reins were handed over to Gen Z girls and their iphone 5C’s, and the campaign, unsurprisingly, absolutely ate. Guess Jeans’ Instagram page has been wiped to make way for the self-shot, self-styled and self-captioned content by local internet legends like (Glamcult darling) Sotce, Chessa Subbiondo, Claire Cameron, Echo Seireeni, Mazzy Joya, Taya Salley, and Victoria Davidoff. The concept seems simple: selfies, pastel yellow text, Guess-pun phrases that range from spoiled “I get everything I want, I GUESS,” to peak American girlhood “O-M-Jeans,” to profoundly philosophical “I think therefore I GUESS”. We’re hooked.
Seeing content that is typically dismissed as “silly little posts” being celebrated as the high-value, creative, time-consuming, and truly influential content it is, is great, to put it simply. This campaign celebrates what true modern girlhood looks like, and makes her TikTok likes worthy of the 21st century’s pedestal: a billboard.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. We’re thrilled to live in an era where girlhood’s artefacts (junk journals, pink bedrooms, crafting, tiktok dances) are celebrated and studied rather than dismissed. The GIRLS exhibition in MoMu, Nicolaia Rips’ recent defence of The Hot Girl Who Writes, the surge in popularity for the Eve Babitz and Anais Nin Diaries, to name a few. This campaign belongs in that space, too. It has the clarity of Charli XCX’s BRAT era and the effortless cool of American Apparel ads (please lord let it be minus their old controversies – praying this campaign ages better than AA did). Alas, the cultural and commercial value of girls on TikTok has been harnessed!
While the campaign is posed as an exercise in radical nonchalance, could it also be read as something potentially deeper? Slogans like “When u say ‘you know,’ do u know you know or do you really mean ‘you GUESS’?” feel like a middle finger to mansplaining. Some commenters read the campaign as bimbofication. But is that the whole story? “I think, therefore I GUESS” can be misread as vapid, but isn’t that missing the point? Doubt is often coded as weakness in women, yet it might just as easily signal a capacity for critical thinking. The slogan riffs on certainty and gently, firmly refuses it. “I think, therefore I am,” but a Guess Girl might ask “are we even? Haven’t we come to realise that facts are… your best educated GUESS until proven otherwise?” There’s power in its nonchalant placement. A paradigm-shifting idea, slipped casually into an Instagram caption? OK girl. Now we wanna be you.
The refusal to over-explain is also their smartest marketing move. The campaign acknowledges something brands tend to ignore: internet-savvy, fashion-forward, chronically online audiences don’t want translation. Relatable content thrives on context, remixing, and interaction, and brand recognisability works the same way a TikTok trend does.
Some might read this piece cynically. What’s so radical about a brand letting skinny (mainly white) girls take hot selfies to sell jeans? The world is on fire and this is what we’re talking about? That said, it struck a nerve, and I’ve caught myself dissecting this, joyfully, as a cultural artefact (which it is?) rather than a commercial (which it is first and foremost). When’s the last time a marketing scheme did that to you in a positive manner? Of course, American Eagle’s Good Jeans billboard with Sydney Sweeney left quite the impression, albeit negative at best. Is this the era of tantalizing jeans billboards? You could say every billboard trying to sell you something is capitalist and therefore inherently a bit evil, and in the grand scheme of things, might not be driving us forward, but in the state of the world right now, we’ll take a smile where we can get one, I GUESS.
Words by Pykel van Latum
Images courtesy of GUESS JEANS
