Sydney Sweeney’s done a lot of ads and promotions over the last few years, but none have gotten attention close to the level of her American Eagle ad. The jeans have some calling her and the company out over the belief the brand was promoting eugenics with its “genes” tagline. Things took a turn when footage of Sweeney in her princess ballgown was captured at her new Americana premiere, with a few people on the sidewalk shouting at her. But her brother, at least, is treating the whole thing like one big joke.
Sweeney’s younger brother Trent recently promoted to staff sergeant and shared the certificate of his appointment onto his Instagram Stories. While a cool movie, it’s not the type of the thing that would probably be covered by mainstream news, except for the fact he captioned the post, “It’s them good jeans,” capturing the attention of the Internet.
In this case, he’s definitely not joking about denim. Take a look.
The whole discourse around this ad, which features Ms. Sweeney in denim jeans and a top and focuses on a play of the word jeans and genes by mentioning the notoriously chic and good-looking actress has “good jeans.” In the original ad, the word genes is crossed out and replaced with “jeans.”
The billboard went viral, and American Eagle later said the “jeans/genes” wordplay was always intended to sell jeans and not intended to be a commentary on eugenics. Early posts in the campaign were tagged with #SydneySweeneyhasgreatjeans, but in more recent days the hashtag seems to have been dropped by the brand.
Despite the AE response, subsequent commentary has persisted, presumably leading Trent to do a little trolling on his sister’s behalf this week.
Meanwhile, I’m not sure how much this matters to Ms. Sweeney. The actress has been out there carving her own career, figuring out what branding narrative she’d like to pursue, and even producing her own projects. She recently even sold her own bathwater as soap, a marketing scheme that’s way more outside-the-box than what American Eagle was trying to achieve.
Amidst this unusual controversy, she’s also been working hard filming Euphoria Season 3, took a break to spend some time with a mystery man in Idaho, and was recently spotted spending some time with co-stars Hunter Schafer and Maude Apatow doing karaoke. Her new film, Americana, hits the 2025 movie release schedule next week, on August 15th.
