The ad campaign American Eagle ran with Sydney Sweeney in July quickly outgrew the container of retail fashion that it was created within. The promotional material for a line of jeans arrived with the tagline, “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans/Genes.” The play on words was slammed with allegations of dog-whistling eugenics. The conversation swelled, spilled over, and soon enough, the president and the vice-president of the United States were using it as culture war ammunition. Sweeney herself said she barely saw any of it.
“It was surreal,” Sweeney told GQ about her experience seeing Donald Trump and J.D. Vance speak about the ad. On Truth Social, Trump wrote, “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there.” Vance said on a podcast that Democrats expressing outrage at “a pretty girl doing a jeans ad” would push young men away from them in the midterms.
When asked if having public support from “very powerful people” made her feel thankful, Sweeney said, “I don’t think…. It’s not that I didn’t have that feeling, but I wasn’t thinking of it like that, of any of it. I kind of just put my phone away. I was filming every day. I’m filming Euphoria, so I’m working 16-hour days, and I don’t really bring my phone on set, so I work and then I go home and I go to sleep. So I didn’t really see a lot of it.”
What she did pay attention to, however, was the sales. “I was aware of the numbers as it was going. So when I saw all the headlines of in-store visits were down a certain percentage, none of it was true,” she said. “It was all made up, but nobody could say anything because [the company was] in their quiet period. So it was all just a lot of talk. And because I knew at the end of the day what that ad was for, and it was great jeans, it didn’t affect me one way or the other.”
Sweeney remarked that the “reaction definitely was a surprise,” adding that she is “literally in jeans and a T-shirt every day of my life.” In September, American Eagle shared data showing that their Sydney Jacket sold out in one day, while their Sydney Jean sold out in one week, with plans to restock in November, per People.
During recent promotional tours, including for the film Christy, Sweeney declined to comment on the American Eagle controversy. It would have been somewhat fitting for the film, which contains prominent themes of domestic violence. Proceeds from items in the Sweeney campaign benefit the Crisis Text Line.
“I’ve always believed that I’m not here to tell people what to think. I’m just here to kind of open their eyes to different ideas,” Sweeney said. “That’s why I gravitate towards characters and stories that are complicated and are maybe morally questionable, and characters that are—on the page—hard to like, but then you find the humanity underneath them.”
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When asked if she wanted to clarify anything about the ads for her great jeans and great genes, Sweeney responded, “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”
From Rolling Stone US
