'It Gets Worse': The White House Just Weighed In On All The American Eagle Backlash, And It's Not A Good Look For Sydney Sweeney
The new jeans campaign has been hit with complaints about everything from Sydney's hypersexualization to the tone of her voice. However, it's fair to say that the biggest talking point has been around the perceived racial undertones and links to eugenics.
For context, the tagline of the campaign is 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,' and, as is explicitly pointed out, the whole thing is a play on Sydney's 'great genes.' Some people have taken issue with the glorification of Sydney's genetics as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white woman, accusing AE of promoting eugenics and 'white supremacy.'
One of the clips that received the most backlash centers on Sydney saying: 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.' This video has seemingly been pulled from AE's social pages.
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Especially in the current political climate, being accused of promoting whiteness is not a great look for the brand, nor for Sydney, who has previously had to address 'misinterpretations' about her and her family's political stance after people on her Instagram page were seen wearing MAGA-style hats.
It's worth mentioning that Sydney has remained publicly apolitical amid conversations about her family's political beliefs.
Now, as the AE discourse continues to develop online, the government has weighed in on the conversation. On July 29, White House communications manager Steven Cheung took to X to share a screenshot of an MSNBC headline suggesting that the AE ad is indicative of an 'unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness.' Slamming 'dense liberal thinking,' Cheung called the reaction: 'Cancel culture run amok.'
'This warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024,' he wrote. 'They're tired of this bullshit.'
As you can imagine, the White House's response has only fueled conversations about Sydney and the divisive campaign. The latest reactions online are pretty intense, with people highlighting that it hasn't exactly made the situation any better, and it's also not a good look for Sydney to have the Trump administration aligning itself with her.
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Meanwhile, others expressed confusion and disbelief that the White House even took the time to address the discourse, asking, 'do you not have a country to run?'
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Neither Sydney nor AE has publicly addressed the backlash, but has this made things worse? LMK your thoughts in the comments.
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This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Sydney Sweeney has spent most of her career trying to embody the American archetype of the blonde bombshell — and that's a role that comes with baggage. It's a highly charged encapsulation of American fantasies and fears about white femininity: what a nice white lady should be, and what we are afraid she might be. How Hollywood built a bombshell 'The biggest misconception about me is that I am a dumb blonde with big tits,' Sweeney told Glamour UK in 2023. Then the punchline: 'I'm naturally brunette.' Blonde bombshells have a long and storied history. Hollywood's first, Jean Harlow, was also a bottle blonde. Beloved for her big-eyed comic timing and her easy, expressive charm, Harlow first broke out in the 1930s after Hollywood makeup artist Max Factor developed a platinum blonde hair color for her. To the press, she was the blonde bombshell — so sexy and so blonde that she could blow up a man's life. In 1933, Jean Harlow starred in a satire loosely based on her life. LMPC via Getty Images In 1933, Harlow starred in Bombshell, a satire loosely based on her own life. ('Blonde,' the movie poster helpfully added right above the title, in case anyone needed reminding that 'blonde' and 'bombshell' went together.) Harlow would maintain her hair color with a weekly application of hydrogen peroxide and ammonia to the roots up until her tragic death in 1937 at the age of 26. If Harlow built the bombshell persona, Marilyn Monroe perfected it. Monroe too was a natural brunette, and she too went to Max Factor, who used an updated version of Harlow's platinum formula to create Monroe's signature look. Monroe's legacy would become her image as the blonde bombshell, the woman with sex appeal so potent it landed like a thrown bomb. The bombshell's blondeness classically means that the bombshell is white. In part because of the moment in which the archetype emerged, there is a kind of retro all-American pluck to her look: teased hair, big, blue eyes, tanned white skin that will pop in Technicolor. Her blondeness, powerful and artificial, seems to amplify her whiteness, almost to burlesque it. It's part of her exclusive and racialized desirability: The bombshell is the most attractive woman in the world, and she is firmly, WASPily white. The bombshell is hypersexual but innocent; powerful but naive. She is both an empowering image of feminine soft power and a regressive conservative ideal: unapologetically sexual in a way that plays against puritanical norms; at the same time girlish, compliant, unthreatening. The power of her sexuality becomes unthreatening because the blonde bombshell is too stupid and naive to ever use it against a watching man. That's part of the joke of Sweeney's 'biggest misconception about me' line: The blonde bombshell is supposed to be dumb. It's part of what makes her hot. It's also part of why the jeans/genes ad inspires such a strange mixture of glee and discomfort in its watching audience. When Sweeney lingers on her blondeness and her curves to evoke the bombshell, she's invoking a powerful archetype. The blonde bombshell comes with an association of retro '50s Americana that's comforting for an audience that imagines that America peaked in the postwar decades. For another audience, less powerful than the nostalgia is the implied threat that comes with it: This is what good genes look like, and if you deviate from the norm, you can be punished. To be clear, there's no reason to think Sweeney is clued into any of these malevolent implications when she shows off her curves in a jeans ad. 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