Sydney's Business

The 28-year-old actor created this moment. But does it belong to her?

- Photographed by MORGAN MAHER Styled by BRANDON TAN Written by ALEXANDRA WHITTAKER

Jacket from Depop.skirt Reparto, shoes Giuseppe Zanotti, earrings Bucherer, ring Jacob & Co. and (right hand) Van Cleef & Arpels, all underwear and lingerie (worn throughout) SYRN.

Sydney Sweeney arrived at her Cosmopolitan shoot armed with lingerie and conviction: She was ready to pose nearly naked in SYRN, her new line of intimate apparel, exposing both her Hollywood-idealized body and her business acumen.

In any other year, with any other star, it'd be par for the celebrity course. In 2026, with Sydney Sweeney, it's a Rorschach test.

If you ask her, which we did, the images you're looking at are about control. She's creating a moment she can own in something she designed, asserting with lace what she hasn't yet with language.

But when a body becomes a message, it's often others deciding what it means. Putting something like this out there right now, into a fractured digital landscape eager to spar with itself, is a provocative proposition—especially for Sydney, who spent 2025 becoming arguably the most polarizing star in America.¹

Still, she says, she needs people to see her in her lingerie and understand this: "I want SYRN to stand for the power of choice."

It's Sydney's choice to lay herself bare, and it's your choice whether or not to buy it. Until recently, her image was featured in lighter cultural conversations. Sydney was best known for breakout television performances on HBO, playing opposite ends of the same spectrum as The White Lotus's Olivia, a hyper-verbal avatar of Gen Z moral certainty who wields cutting language as power, and Euphoria's