Maybe Sydney Sweeney Is Exactly Who She Appears To Be

The script of the past seven days of discourse has followed the same structure as it always does. The classic problematic campaign meets backlash, followed by outrage at the backlash, to why are we still talking about this? pipeline has been in full effect. Every side is playing its part. The “woke left” is calling out eugenics-adjacent language masquerading as a silly denim pun in American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” ad. The far right are hailing Sweeney as their Aryan princess and chastizing anyone who dares to point out that a white blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman saying she has “good genes” could be interpreted as a racist dogwhistle. The “it’s not that serious” crowd is calling both sides extremist and reactionary. The TikTokers are engagement farming and clout chasing. The social media warriors are fighting on Threads or X or Bluesky or wherever they get their quick takes off these days. Everyone is wrong, and no one is sane. That’s the prevailing internet narrative, anyway, that it’s all outrage for outrage's sake and Sweeney is just an innocent bystander caught in the crosshairs of the culture war. 

Cut to the latest (unsurprising) twist: Buzzfeed reported that Sweeney is a registered Republican in the state of Florida as of 2024. She now has a fan in Donald Trump. Not only is deciding to register as a Republican in 2024 a wild choice considering, well — gestures wildly — everything. But 2024 was the year the party doubled down on its anti-immigration rhetoric, which fueled policies that led to ICE ripping people from the streets and tearing families apart. It was the year they continued their war against reproductive rights and trans people. 2024 was the year the Republican Party re-elected Trump, a convicted rapist, racist and criminal, into office. Again. The Republican Party and its members are exactly who they say they are — so why won’t anyone believe the same about Sweeney? 

For the past few years of Sweeney’s rise to fame, she’s been upheld as a beacon of the anti-woke mob, a symbol of Making America Great Again. Finally, the MAGA purists hailed, a thin, white, blonde woman with big boobs is popular again! As if the incremental push for diversity ever really threatened this beauty standard. Heavy sigh. Sweeney has found herself in the middle of online firestorms before, like when her family threw a MAGA-themed birthday party and she posted photos from the event on Instagram (she vaguely denied that the event was “political”). For the most part, I agree that we’re thinking about Sydney Sweeney entirely too much, and that her burgeoning career hasn’t been interesting (or excellent) enough to warrant this much energy. But, like so many celebrities before her, Sweeney’s presence has become a stand-in for something greater than herself. Taylor Swift was once the Great White Hope placed on a pedestal by her whiteness alone, but MAGA knocked her off once she spoke out against Trump and encouraged her fans to vote Democrat. 

Now that Sweeney is their icon, you’d think that if she wasn’t aligned with MAGA’s views, she’d want to squash those rumors, too. For whatever reason, instead of coming to the obvious conclusion that Sweeney knows exactly what’s happening and either agrees with these conservative stances or simply just doesn’t care that she’s the poster child for white supremacists, I’ve seen posts and comments trying to explain away Sweeney’s involvement in her string of controversies. She only went to Amazon supervillain Jeff Bezos’ wedding because he’s an investor in her lingerie line! She’s only a registered Republican for tax purposes! Her team is picking these ads for her to do and she’s too naive to stop them! Ignorance as a virtue is something only white women seem to be afforded. Sweeney is 27-years-old, and has been vocal about how involved she is in the business of her brand and her desire to make money beyond acting. American Eagle’s VP of marketing reportedly wrote on LinkedIn that, “During a Zoom call with Sydney, we asked the question, ‘How far do you want to push it?’ Without hesitation, she smirked and said, ‘Let’s push it, I’m game.’”

That does not sound like a woman whose team forced her to star in an ad that was unintentionally provocative. That sounds like Sweeney aimed to provoke — gladly and gleefully. It’s easy to blame the friend who’s “too woke” (don’t get me started on how this word has been stripped of its meaning) for overreacting to an ad American Eagle says was not ill-intentioned. The company released a lackluster statement defending the ad, claiming “[it] is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story.” The Instagram post goes on to say, “Great jeans look good on everyone.” We could take the company trying to sell more denim (American Eagle’s stock has reportedly risen since the backlash) at face value, and pretend alongside them that this was all an innocent misunderstanding. But we’re too smart for that. Marketing campaigns go through many checks and balances. There are full teams hired to predict backlash, to gauge potential interpretations and mitigate risk. Once more for the people in the back: Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle knew exactly what they were doing. 

“Jeans are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” Sweeney says in the ad, reminiscent of another controversial denim commercial starring a then-15-year-old Brooke Shields. Even if people had overlooked the eugenics dogwhistle, I refuse to believe the actress and AE didn’t know there would be blowback to the nostalgic reverence of an ad that was criticized for sexualizing a minor. They wanted our outrage. They wanted our attention, by any means necessary. And we’ve given it to them in spades. Even when the discourse dissipated, right wing commentators still used it for their own agendas. As Doreen St Felix writes for The New Yorker, “the fawning from conservatives—everyone from Megyn Kelly to J. D. Vance—is reactive, precipitated by the dislike, which, yes, reached a pitch of outrage, but dissipated, fairly quickly I think, into a bored fatigue.”

And it is boring to dissect the ad’s deliberate attention-seeking. Sweeney is hot, blonde, and better than you. How yawn-inducing. It’s what mainstream culture has been selling us for centuries. While I think we should probably be more outraged that Sweeney still speaks in a baby voice and can’t enunciate even though articulation is quite literally her job, I also can’t ignore the fact that this ad is indicative of the shift we’re seeing in Hollywood via America as a whole — away from inclusivity and sensitivity and barreling backwards towards exclusion and division without consequences. Someone who looks like Sydney Sweeney — who, let’s be clear, never stopped benefiting from the system — stands to benefit even more from this culture change. It’s no wonder she’s seemingly leading the charge. 

“[Sweeney and everyone else involved] certainly know that ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,’ would resonate at a time when immigrants are openly persecuted by a president who speaks regularly of bloodlines, ‘bad genes,’ and ‘cleaning out’ Gaza’s Palestinian population.” Andi Zeisler writes for Salon. Zeisler does a great job of laying out the connection between the history of Nazism, our current political climate, and why it’s not absurd to call it out when brands are overtly praising the superiority of stereotypical Eurocentric features. Felix for The New Yorker goes on to mention the talking points of those who have chided anyone who pointed out the ad as propaganda: “Can’t you handle a stupid pun, in other words? To be clear, many of us—the Negroes, the queers, the hairy feminists, et cetera, et cetera—do not react out of a feeling of personal injury, as if the blondeness-as-beauty standard has terrorized us. Whom does that standard terrorize more than white cis women, honestly? We have our own blondes, selling us fantasies.”

The white supremacist fantasy transcends race and gender. Another recent ad, starring fellow alleged Trump supporter, The Summer I Turned Pretty actor Gavin Casalegno, also refers to genetics. "Look, I didn't ask to be the king of summer. It just kinda happened," Casalegno says in a Dunkin Donuts commercial. "This tan? Genetics. I just got my color analysis back. Guess what? Golden summer. Literally.” It could be unfortunate timing on Dunkin Donuts’ part, and Casalegno, whatever his political affiliation, could actually be the one unwittingly caught in a culture war. Or we can say the quiet part out loud: bragging about white people’s genetics in the year 2025 is fucking weird. I don’t care what you’re promoting.

Sweeney is promoting a movie that no one is talking about. It’s aptly titled Americana. She got heckled at the premiere. If her strategy is that all press is good press, sure, she and her team can call this cycle a win.  She’s a marginally talented actor who needs brand deals and virality to stay relevant. It’s unsurprising that, in the age of influencers and cast decisions determined by follower count, a celebrity would emerge that courts controversy and engagement like the industry is her algorithm. Sweeney was just spotted (strategically?) singing karaoke with her Euphoria co-star Hunter Schafer, who is openly trans and the greatest fear of the same base who just crowned Sweeney their queen. "Go get ‘em Sydney!" Trump wrote on social media yesterday morning. Schafer revealed earlier this year that she was issued a passport with the wrong gender under the Trump administration. Sweeney’s coworkers are under attack by her most ardent defenders. 

Does any of that matter to Sweeney as long as she’s booked, busy, and constant conversation fodder? And if the backlash starts to hurt her bottom line, how long before she goes from conservative Barbie to repentant ally? Unlike her marginalized peers, she has the luxury of fucking up, repeatedly. Ultimately, Sweeney’s political affiliations are relevant but less important than what her current cultural dominance says about Hollywood — and America itself. We may be taking Sydney Sweeney too seriously… or not seriously enough.