How an ad campaign went so wrong.

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It was the vocal fry heard and mocked ’round the internet: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” A pause, as a lounging Sydney Sweeney zips up her jeans, then looks up with her big blue eyes: “My jeans are blue.”

Genes, jeans—it’s a pun, get it? That wordplay is the foundation of Sweeney’s new ad campaign, filmed for the clothing retailer American Eagle to promote new products made in collaboration with the actress. (Proceeds for one item, a pair of jeans with a butterfly appliqué meant to represent domestic violence awareness, will go to the Crisis Text Line, a mental-health support organization.) “My body’s composition is determined by my genes,” Sweeney says in another video as the camera zooms in on her oft-discussed bosom. “Hey! Eyes up here,” she commands, meeting the camera’s jolted-up gaze with a knowing smile. Then the tagline, unignorably large, fills the screen: “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.”

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A Hollywood starlet using sexuality to hawk denim—is there anything so American? But times have changed, and these days, a blond, blue-eyed white woman being held up as the exemplar of “great genes” is a concept that maybe shouldn’t have made it past the copywriters room. With a velocity that is honestly impressive, the ads became both a widespread meme and the latest entry in our ongoing culture wars. One side declared that American Eagle’s campaign carried racial undertones, promoted eugenics, and served as fascistic propaganda. The other side embraced Sweeney as a jeans model and celebrated the commercials as a nail in the coffin for “woke” advertising. Meanwhile, American Eagle’s stock briefly rallied after the ads went live, although the political leanings of meme-stock investors remain, as always, a fascinating enigma.

As much as extremely online critics may denounce these ads as a Nazi dog whistle, I have to say, I’m not so sure. For one, the campaign is clearly paying direct homage to an old Brooke Shields ad for Calvin Klein jeans, filmed in the 1980s, in which the uncomfortably young Blue Lagoon actress delivers a similarly biology textbook–worthy spiel: “Genes are fundamental in determining the characteristics of an individual and passing on these characteristics to succeeding generations.” For two, it’s fairly obvious that the “great genes” in Sweeney’s ads are referring to—not to be crude about it—two of her biggest assets (and maybe a third, if you’re an ass guy), which feature prominently.

But even if the certified geniuses who came up with this campaign didn’t mean to promote the Aryan ideal in their lingering shots of Sweeney’s denim-clad body, I’m not surprised that it’s come to this. And it’s not even anything specifically to do with American Eagle, a mall brand that most people probably haven’t thought of since the day they graduated from college. No, it has much more to do with Sweeney herself, a celebrity whose fraught image has been elevated and battered, stretched and twisted, objectified and torn apart in equal measure since her star began rising. For months now, a Sydney Sweeney backlash has been brewing; this ill-conceived ad campaign was just the inflection point.

Sweeney has been acting since 2009, when she was 12 years old, but her breakthrough didn’t come until 2019, when she starred as Cassie, a high schooler with a reputation for being easy to hook up with, in the Zendaya-led HBO teen drama Euphoria. This role, more than any other, has shaped Sweeney’s image, cementing her as a sex symbol who appeals to men’s tastes. She didn’t shy away from nudity, she didn’t talk about politics or divisive issues or even artsy fluff, and, frankly, she was attractive in a classic Americana kind of way. Her stock only went up with some conservative admirers when a small dustup in 2022 suggested that Sweeney, who was born in Spokane, Washington, and grew up in rural Idaho, had family members who wore “Blue Lives Matter” apparel and MAGA-style red hats to her mother’s birthday party. (Sweeney, addressing the controversy in a Variety interview a year later, said that the people pictured weren’t her family and were wearing the red hats—emblazoned with the words Make Sixty Great Again—to be “funny.”)

But there were also hints that there was more to Sweeney than what the general public and horny men between the ages of 18 and 55 saw of her. She displayed her acting prowess in other projects, including the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, Mike White’s White Lotus, and especially Reality, a 2023 film in which she played Reality Winner, the National Security Agency whistleblower. She founded her own production company, and her role executive producing and co-starring in the 2023 rom-com hit Anyone but You proved that she had some level of producing chops too. She tinkered with cars! She seemed self-aware about being typecast as “a dumb blonde with big tits”! (“I’m naturally brunette,” she jokingly rebutted in one interview.) She grew up in a family that had experienced financial hardship and, even after her career breakthrough, she confessed to taking so many brand deals because she was still always worried about money! “People are making far more money than Sweeney for doing work that both demands and contributes far less,” Defector’s Kelsey McKinney wrote in 2022, in a widely shared piece that defended Sweeney in the struggle against capital. “Why should any CEO make more than the actresses whose labor and beauty they sell?”

Sweeney was sympathetic, in other words—or just at the edge of sympathy. You looked at her, and you saw a hard-working, hustling young actress who was constantly reduced to a great rack, who was co-opted by conservatives in their anti-woke crusade, who inspired the strangest debates over a woman’s beauty (or lack thereof, according to what I suspect are some of the most average-looking incels alive). Out of some uneasy sense of solidarity, or perhaps well-meaning condescension, or possibly even the desire to not just assume the worst about a hot blond woman, you wanted to root for Sweeney.

But over the past six months or so, feelings toward the actress have undergone a shift. In March, she was spotted attending the wedding of Glen Powell’s sister, reigniting rumors that Sweeney had been romantically involved with Powell, her Anyone but You co-star, at a time when both actors were in respective relationships with other people. (Powell’s ex, a model known as Gigi Paris, didn’t help things when she went on a podcast in June and said of the co-stars, “I hope they’re in love.”) As if that whiff of accused infidelity weren’t enough, some of Sweeney’s many, many brand deals started to smell a little more pungently shameless, with Sweeney pulling a Belle Delphine and selling Dr. Squatch—a male-targeted personal-care brand—soap containing her bathwater. (Before you ask, yes, it sold out.) Then, to top it all off, in June Sweeney was a guest at Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s Venice wedding, a locally despised event so tacky that any famous person seen in attendance immediately lost all semblance of glamour. (Sweeney was also papped strolling around the Floating City with fellow wedding attendee Orlando Bloom, fresh off a breakup with Katy Perry—Sydney, girl, this doesn’t look good for you!)

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There was still some benefit of the doubt, however tiny, that could be extended to Sweeney when considering just one or two of her brand-cheapening faux pas in isolation. She was family friends with all of the Powells! Her bathwater soap was just her being in on the joke! She was in Venice to secure funding for a business venture funded in part by Bezos’ private equity firm! But the public goodwill for the whole package she was peddling, and for her as a celebrity, was steadily diminishing. “She’s a pick-me” has been one common sentiment surrounding her, voiced often on social media and in celebrity-gossip forums. What that means, essentially, is that she has lost the women, the demographic that typically constitutes the fan bases of our most beloved stars and that is willing to support nearly any amount of frivolity so long as it’s delivered with the right wink and a nod or sincere note of vulnerability. Once, this kind of pop-culture consumer might have been persuaded to half-heartedly root for Sweeney to prove haters and salivating male fans alike wrong against surely insurmountable odds. Now, though, between rumors over her messy entanglements, her off-tone sponsorships and deals, and her thirsty connections with the Bezoses of the world, she has proved something else instead: that Sweeney the star is not the cool girl some onlookers hoped she might be—someone who’s in on the gag only, like, in a sort of feminist way.

But what did anyone expect from an actress who never made any such promises about who she was, whether politically, commercially, or romantically? Celebrity is neither a pledge of values nor a bond of intimacy. It’s a sales mechanism, one that facilitates the vending of tabloids, of movies, of albums, of bathwater soap and butterfly jeans. To believe otherwise is only to set yourself up for disappointment, as some former Sweeney defenders may be discovering this week. So, no, I’m not reading eugenics into the thoughtless American Eagle ad, but at this point, it hardly even matters. At the end of the day, a sizable, very vocal chunk of America has spoken: They are no longer interested in buying whatever Sweeney is selling.

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