Sydney Sweeney has become the poster-girl for Trump’s America – her next move will make or break her

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.

Within hours of the ads appearing, the idea that “Sydney Sweeney is advertising eugenics” had spread to all corners of social media; discussion about the commodification of women’s bodies and weaponised whiteness spread like wildfire. One particular TikTok post, liked almost 300,000 times and now referenced in every thinkpiece that has appeared since, declared: “It’s literally giving Nazi propaganda.”

“The discourse is broken,” The Atlantic announced soon after – the response, quite unsurprisingly, was in turn deemed “frenzied” and “hysterical”, deeply liberal, and, notably, deeply feminine.

“What ends up happening in these scenarios is that everyone gets very mad, in a way that allows for a touch of moral superiority and is also good for creating online content,” staff writer Charlie Warzel wrote. “The Sweeney ad, like any good piece of discourse, allows everyone to exploit a political and cultural moment for different ends. Some of it is well intentioned. Some of it is cynical. Almost all of it persists because there are deeper things going on that people actually want to fight about.”

He was right: the rest was yet to come. By Monday, Sweeney’s moment was in its second wave when it emerged that she had allegedly registered as a Republican voter in the months leading up to Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election. Hours later, Trump himself got involved with a now-deleted tweet that, among the typos, praised Sweeney as “a beautiful patriot” and “the future of great American jeans”.

Vice-president JD Vance had already had his say, appearing on Ruthless – a conservative US podcast – spouting “advice to the Democrats” that they should “tell everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive [that they’re] a Nazi”. “You have a normal, all-American, beautiful girl doing, like, a normal jeans ad,” he said, adding that any “hostility” Sweeney receives is actually about “basic American life”.

open image in gallery

American Eagle stock skyrocketed – and the discourse went nuclear.

What happens when you become a symbol in someone else’s culture war? Sweeney is finding out. In this environment, her politicisation by the right makes total sense.

Sweeney is young, white, and straightforwardly attractive. Her good-girl-gone-adjacent image is tradwife-coded and prime fodder for a conservative movement searching for A-listers who could be framed – or claimed – as ideologically sympathetic. It is the antithesis to “WOKE” advertising, as the president of the United States put it this week, adding that Taylor Swift was “NO LONGER HOT” (case in point).

It’s not out of the blue, either – back in March, the right declared that Sweeney had “killed wokeness” with her cleavage after she wore a low-cut top during an appearance on Saturday Night Live (“Yay! Boobs are back!” The Spectator reported the following day).

Couple that with an environment that claims silence is as good as complicity; with the actor’s lack of vocal support for progressive causes; with the rise and rise of reactionary culture war – and Sweeney was always going to be a target. The thing is, she’s not churning butter with the #Tradwives on TikTok, or quoting Jordan Peterson; she doesn’t have to. The unsettling thing is just how easy it is now to become a right-wing spokesperson without endorsing any ideology – and without actually saying anything at all.

open image in gallery

The irony, as many have pointed out, is that the original backlash wasn’t nearly as extensive as it might have been. But in the end, Sweeney’s moment has been more about what a culture war looks like these days. Was it all engineered? Is good PR, now, just having the knack of the discourse machine? It may very well be.

Now, Sweeney has a pivotal decision to make: will she lean into her freshly pressed Trump vibes and conservative image, as amplified by her appearance at Jeff Bezos’s recent wedding? Will she address the controversy head-on? Both, somehow, seem pretty unlikely. Rather, it seems that the best course for Sweeney is to stay stealthily discreet.

It seems to be working for her so far – perhaps a sign that the coalface of so-called “cancel culture” is changing. Besides, while the scandal might have reached the heights of international discourse, it’s still just an internet storm – and, like the rest of them, one viral moment away from being forgotten.

Whatever happens next, the only thing we know for sure is this: Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. Maybe it really was all about denim.