Sydney Sweeney isn’t apologizing for her American Eagle jeans ad.
Back in July, clothing outfitter American Eagle called upon actress Sydney Sweeney to be a celebrity spokesperson for their jeans. Because the 27-year-old actress is conventionally attractive, the company decided to use a play on words (jeans and genes) to say that Sweeney has good jeans.
Here it is in case you missed it:
American Eagle’s ad campaign was obviously meant to be lighthearted, and harken the older media practice of having someone pretty and famous promote a product. Genius, right? And all it is is wordplay… Sydney Sweeney has good genes (qualities passed down from her parents), and good jeans – the one’s she’s helping sell that American Eagle produces.
But shocker… people online started claiming that the advertisements promote white supremacy, eugenics and, wait for it…. Nazism.
To be clear, I’m not even going to attempt to unpack that. It’s a absurd stretch if I’ve ever seen one… just like the stretchiness that American Eagle jeans offer (that’s right, I own a couple of pairs of jeans from there myself). All the clothing company was trying to do was a) produce a clever ad and b) use Sydney Sweeney, who seems like she’s in almost everything in the modern era of TV and film, to do so.
For months, Sydney Sweeney has been asked about the ad campaign, whether or not she regrets doing it, and if she’d like to apologize for being a part of the “controversial” commercial. That was very much the focus of her latest interview with GQ, where the Euphoria star sat down with the publication’s features director Katherine Stoeffel and talked about her accidental entry into the political world
Before they even got to the American Eagle stuff, Sweeney first explained that she doesn’t mind taking on roles that make people think. That being said, she won’t ever do something where she’s telling people how or what to think:
“I’ve always believed that I’m not here to tell people what to think. I’m just here to kind of open their eyes to different ideas. And so I think that’s why I gravitate to characters and stories that are complicated.”
That opened the flood gates for the jeans/genes conversations.
Katherine Stoeffel first asked Sydney Sweeney if she was surprised by the reaction and backlash that the ad was met with. The talented actress was very quick to admit that she couldn’t believe how big it had gotten, and that in her mind, she was just doing a clothing commercial:
“I did a jean ad. The reaction definitely was a surprise, but I love jeans. All I wear are jeans. I’m literally in jeans and a T-shirt every day of my life.”
The GQ features director then followed that up by asking how it felt to see that the President of the United States was weighing in on the matter (Trump called the ad “fantastic”). Stoeffel said that she would have probably been grateful to have high-profile people like the POTUS having her back, which kind of felt like a set up to get Sweeney to say the same thing.
But Sydney kept things cool and said she was busy filming a TV show when everything was really getting out of hand:
“It was surreal… it’s not that I didn’t have that feeling, but I wasn’t thinking of it like that. Or like, of any of it. I kind of just put my phone away. I was filming (Euphoria) every day.”
Finally, the interviewer from GQ stopped beating around the bush and opened the floor for the actress to say anything that was on her mind about the ad and the backlash. But what she was really doing was ever so graciously giving Sydney a chance to apologize for her involvement in the jeans/genes ad.
Sydney Sweeney didn’t take the bait, and refused to apologize:
“The ad spoke for itself… I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”
It was clear that Sydney Sweeney was ready to move on after that last question. Sure enough, that was the last portion of the interview that focused on the American Eagle jeans. Safe to say the stare that Sweeney gave the GQ features director was enough to move things along.
Watch how it all went down in the interview below, and make sure you note her utterly stone-faced, unbothered, dare I say, defiant look to such obnoxious questions. It’s a wonder why celebrities even participate in these interviews at all anymore…
