Sydney Sweeney is standing at the fridge in light blue stonewashed jeans ripped at the knee. She’s wearing jorts (jean shorts) while being interrogated on her front lawn.
She’s in a cafe toilet trying to hand-dry a wet patch on her belted, high-waisted jeans. She’s hanging out with her girlfriends in baggy 1960s dungarees.
It’s obvious, isn’t it? This conclusive evidence – images from the films Echo Valley, Reality, Anyone but You and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood respectively – proves it. The Gen-Z actor has been a sleeper agent for Big Denim all along.
Now, she’s been reactivated via a starring role in an advertisement for American Eagle Outfitters declaring “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” and, oops, suddenly this narrative arc is less about fabric, more about fascism.
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How did we get here? Is there any way back? Help! We’re going to need suitable footwear and maybe some kind of industrial clothing.
The ad’s tagline indulges in a little light wordplay by riffing on the phrase “great genes”. One video in the campaign shows Sweeney approaching a billboard and crossing out the word “genes”, replacing it with jeans.
In another video, published on American Eagle’s social-media channels, Sweeney is paid to say this: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.”
Congratulations, I guess?
[ Humourless raging against Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans ad is pointlessOpens in new window ]
Not everyone was a fan. The suggestion afloat on TikTok was that it was all a bit queasy.
Lurking in the background were two Sweeney or Sweeney-adjacent fashion choices that had been previously logged and reported. Viral pictures once revealed that MAGA hats were sported by some guests at her mother’s hoedown-themed birthday party.
Then there was the white dress she wore in March 2024 while fronting Saturday Night Live (SNL) – this was a satin number so powerful it prompted conservative commentators to declare her breasts the “death of woke”.
Notably the American Eagle circus only really took off when the White House, not having anything better to do, got hold of the story and wrung every last drop out of it. They squeezed it dry, which you definitely should not do with denim, and used it to whip passing Democrats over their hapless heads.
“Warped, moronic and dense liberal thinking” was the verdict of White House communications manager Steven Cheung. The Dems had gone out of their way “to attack people as Nazis for thinking Sydney Sweeney is beautiful”, weighed in JD Vance. This was just “a normal all-American beautiful girl doing, like, a normal jeans ad”, he said normally.
Then Donald Trump (79), high on the confirmation that Sweeney (27) is a registered Republican, announced it was the “hottest ad out there”, adding for those who hadn’t yet run to the nearest sink: “Go get ‘em, Sydney!”
American Eagle, meanwhile, insisted in a social post that the ad “is and always was about the jeans”. In perhaps its most controversial statement yet, it claimed: “Great jeans look good on everyone”.
[ Sydney Sweeney is selling her bathwater. What has become of us?Opens in new window ]
And so all humans faced a dilemma. Who did they have less faith in? Random, easily baited TikTokers who have never knowingly been strangers to the vomiting emoji? Or American Eagle and the Trump administration?
Look, I don’t want to sway anyone, but it seems relevant that the retailer’s chief marketing officer, Craig Brommers, told trade media outlets before the launch that the ads would use “clever, even provocative language” and the campaign was “definitely going to push buttons”.
Consider those buttons pushed, American Eagle, and enjoy that share-price bump while it lasts.
As for Sweeney, the simplistic and familiar debate is an age-old one about whether a woman is a savvy, canny business supremo having the last laugh, or an unwitting naif lured into the grubby domain of the sort of men who love nothing more than politicising and commercialising women’s bodies.
The truth, as ever, is probably somewhere in-between. Sweeney, we’re told, has captured the anti-woke zeitgeist in the US, but no one ever really captures the zeitgeist – it captures them.
Even if becoming a favourite of Trump’s doesn’t derail her stellar career in the short term, it risks ultimately leaving some kind of “so 2025″-style stain. If that happens, not even her own bathwater – which she recently used, apparently, to sell a line of soap – will be able to neutralise the odour.
Fashion is fickle, and so is Hollywood. The zeitgeist will pass. Generation Alpha will be along in a minute. Like American Eagle’s share price, what goes up must come down.
So even if she distances herself from Trump, or successfully plays both sides of the political divide for a while, his toxic endorsement could – like a pair of skinny jeans on a hot summer’s day – stick.
And that would be a shame, for Sweeney is a compelling and talented actor. She can play sullen and diffident, or spirited and charming. She radiates the rich, spoiled-brat demographic effortlessly, but also inhabits working-class characters without straying into false notes. She does ice-cool pretty well, and raging hot-mess even better.
Her standout role, for me, is in Tina Satter’s 2023 film Reality (available on Prime Video), in which she plays the soon-to-be-jailed security intelligence whistleblower Reality Winner. All the dialogue is taken from a real-life FBI interrogation transcript and Sweeney, simultaneously projecting inner fear and outer calm, delivers her end of it with endearing nuance and subtlety.
Sadly, for everyone who cares about great performances, there are dozens more who care only about great genes/ jeans, great frothing and great hoopla. Sweeney appears to both know this and be keen to profit from it.
But, for the rest of us, what this torturous drama shows up is a shallow, combative culture that’s been stuck in the political machine for too long and wound up shrink-washed.
