How American Eagle let the ‘jean genie’ out of the bottle

After the ad campaign that launched a thousand thinkpieces, the internet is again full of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans - and her political credentials. Zoë Beaty on the right’s new poster girl

- Zoë Beaty

It begins, as all true American tales do, with denim and a row about wokery. Sydney Sweeney - eyes wide, laid back, hair flowing California-blonde - stares through a billboard, straight into the fire.

The advertisement, for American Eagle, was nothing remarkable on the face of it: a generically hot, white person in tight jeans is hardly breaking the mould; nor is it saying anything new. Still, the accompanying tagline - “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” - gave way to a now weeks-long internet meltdown: TikToks, hot takes, op-eds on both sides of the Atlantic, and several congressional tweets; more accusations of liberal hysteria. Why?

Great question. Depending on who you ask, the ad’s slogan - along with Sweeney’s breathy voiceover about “genes” in its video sister ad — was either a classic dad-esque pun, a playful nod to the actor’s obvious attractiveness, or a nefarious dogwhistle for genetic exceptionalism. The brand itself, whose stock was up by more than 17 per cent on Monday afternoon - by way of comparison, Bloomberg reported that at last week’s close, American Eagle’s shares had been down by 36 per cent this year - says it’s about nothing more than denim.

Not exactly. It’s more about a blonde, blue-eyed actor from Spokane, Washington, who rose to fame in cult TV shows such as HBO’s Euphoria and The White Lotus, and who, for the last five years or so, has been driving everyone a bit mad. In front of the camera, her style sits somewhere between bombshell and jaded ingénue. Behind it, as the head of her production company Fifty-Fifty Films, she’s focused primarily on adapting books by female authors into film.

Sweeney - a self-professed “small-town roots” gal - embodies a specific kind of all-American archetype: an approachable, desirable prom-queen-next-door, just ambiguous enough to project whatever you like onto her. This time, that was quite a lot.