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That distinction matters because it helps explain why Sweeney repeatedly ends up at the center of political arguments despite rarely making explicit political statements herself. One faction celebrates her as an “anti-woke” cultural symbol, another faction objects to that symbolism, and Sweeney herself is frequently caught between the two.

The controversy became much larger in July 2025 when American Eagle launched its “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” advertising campaign. The campaign deliberately played on the homophones “jeans” and “genes.” In one advertisement, Sweeney discussed inherited characteristics such as hair and eye color before saying that her “jeans are blue.”

For some critics, the wordplay crossed an uncomfortable line because Sweeney is blonde, blue-eyed and white. They argued that praising her “great genes” could evoke the history of eugenics and racial theories that treated certain inherited physical characteristics as superior. Some online commentators went considerably further, comparing the imagery with white-supremacist or even Nazi propaganda.

Others considered those interpretations excessive. The Los Angeles Times, for example, published commentary explicitly rejecting the idea that the American Eagle commercial itself amounted to a Nazi “dog whistle.” The controversy therefore became partly a dispute over whether critics were uncovering meaningful racial subtext or reading far more ideology into a provocative jeans advertisement than its creators intended.

Another strand of criticism focused less on race and more on advertising aesthetics. Some fashion and cultural commentators argued that the campaign relied heavily on Sweeney’s sexuality, conventional attractiveness and the “male gaze,” and represented a broader return to older marketing techniques built around thinness, whiteness and sex appeal.

American Eagle did not retreat from the campaign. The company defended its slogan as being about jeans and continued using Sweeney in its marketing. The enormous publicity also had a measurable commercial upside: the campaign generated thousands of media stories, massive online attention and an initial jump in American Eagle’s share price.