Declaring that an actor has great jeans should technically be a boring way to sell denim. And yet, an American Eagle ad featuring Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney and some poorly conceived wordplay has broken everyone’s brains.

Last week, the mall brand unveiled a series of ads featuring Sweeney sporting their fall collection. One video shows her filming herself on the floor with a dog; another depicts her fixing the engine of a car. All of them end with a booming, male voice declaring “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” with the copy displayed in large font.

The spots that caught the internet’s ire are arguably the most provocative, each an obvious riff on Brooke Shields’ infamous 1980 Calvin Klein commercial, in which the then-15-year-old actor recites facts about genetics (“certain genes may…fade away,” Shields notes) while posing in the company’s denim. The Sweeney ad plays on the same jeans/genes pun, but in a much clumsier fashion and in a very complicated cultural landscape.

“My body’s composition is determined by my genes,” Sweeney starts in one video that’s since been deleted from American Eagle’s social media. The camera starts to zoom in on her chest before she lightly scolds the operator. “Hey, eyes up here.” In another, she says, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” The camera pans to Sweeney’s eyes, and she says, “My jeans are blue.”

The same pun is used in a poster that reads “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” with the word “genes” crossed out above it. It immediately raised questions about the language of the ad, as well as its blonde-haired, blue-eyed messenger: Are we supposed to want pants or Aryan features?

In its most innocent interpretation, it reads as passe in its use of a “conventionally attractive” spokesmodel. Many, however, have deemed the American Eagle ads a racist dog whistle, some even calling it Nazi propaganda. Meanwhile, voices on the right, including the White House, have celebrated the ads as a middle finger to liberals and “woke.”

The ads are…weird. Why bother buying the jeans if you don’t have the genes it celebrates? Plus, Sweeney’s role in it, given the partisan nonsense she’s been drafted into in the recent past, raises an eyebrow. American Eagle has since clarified its intentions with the ads, stating that the marketing was solely meant to highlight the jeans. “We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way,” read an Instagram statement on August 1. Sweeney has yet to respond.

Regardless, the whole kerfuffle says less about Sweeney herself — or even American Eagle’s marketing team — than about the politically fraught state of media in the US.

A lightning rod on the left and a symbol — voluntary or not — for the right

To comprehend the layers of the controversy, one has to understand the politically charged and paradoxical nature of Sweeney’s image and career thus far.

After landing supporting roles in The Handmaid’s Tale and Sharp Objects, Sweeney received her big break on the HBO teen drama Euphoria in 2019 as self-destructive teenager Cassie Howard. Her role on the show, which often sees her character nude or wearing cleavage-baring tops, has contributed to much of Euphoria’s seedy reputation, while also shaping Sweeney’s bombshell image. The show also helped launch her as an aspiring “prestige” actor; her performance earned critical praise, as well as an Emmy nomination in 2022. She earned an additional nomination that year for her role in HBO’s The White Lotus.

This acclaim was followed by the release of the 2023 romantic-comedy Anyone But You, which she starred in opposite Glen Powell and co-produced. The Shakespeare adaptation was marketed with PR-orchestrated rumors about Sweeney and Powell’s relationship and went on to earn over $200 million globally. By all accounts, it seemed poised to be the next big movie star, with all the makings of a savvy entrepreneur.

Then, around 2024, things started to get strange — and loudly. That year, Sweeney hosted Saturday Night Live. The episode featured several jokes about her breasts, and she wore a low-cut dress during “goodnights.” This elicited multiple op-eds from conservative outlets claiming that Sweeney, and her willingness to participate in gags about her own sex appeal, signaled a return to both a pre-MeToo climate and “traditional” beauty standards. In fact, this wasn’t the first time Sweeney had been linked to conservative ideology, correctly or incorrectly. In 2022, she sparked outrage for photos she posted from her mother’s Western-themed birthday party, which showed relatives wearing MAGA hats and Blue Lives Matter gear in the background. She claimed they were merely ironic costumes, an explanation that failed to quell questions about her political leanings.

Today, the idea that Sweeney might be an undercover agent for MAGA — and voluntary bait for incels — is somewhere between a conspiracy theory and a meme. (No matter that she has supported progressive causes, like Black Lives Matter, appeared at the GLAAD Awards, and said she believes “that a woman has the right to be able to decide over her body.”) Her endorsement work includes brand deals with the country-inspired HeyDude and personal care company Dr. Squatch. By the time she released a soap supposedly made from her own bathwater with the latter company, her critics seemed exhausted by her whole schtick.

“I think her and her camp probably think that they’re playing into [her sexuality] with a wink and a smile and being self-aware about her being consumed as this sex object and that she is in control,” says Garrett Mireles, a New York and Tennessee-based brand strategist and copywriter. “How that’s received in the public eye isn’t as nuanced.”

Mireles says the fact that Sweeney is an actor cast in other people’s work and ideas complicates her ability to control the way her image comes across and who exactly she wants to appeal to.

“Sweeney doesn’t get to control the message as much as a musician does,” Mireles says. “Sabrina Carpenter, for example, is able to exert a sense of humor in her sexuality and to be a little bit more overtly tongue-in-cheek.”

Everything feels like bait in our current culture war

The American Eagle ads felt especially trollish because they seemed to hit on both of the accusations looming over Sweeney’s career: She’s too sexualized, and she’s promoting some sort of right-wing agenda. In this case, the right-coded overtones of the ad — heralding a blonde, white woman’s genes as the epitome of beauty and “goodness” — hit a lot harder.

Any implication of “good genes,” pun or not, would ring alarms in our political climate. Currently, ICE and the Trump administration have undertaken the most aggressive deportation effort in years, including the gleeful construction of an alligator-surrounded detainment center that has been compared to a concentration camp. When talking about crimes committed by immigrants, President Donald Trump has said there are a “lot of bad genes in our country.” Meanwhile, Health Department secretary Robert F. Kennedy has been accused of promoting “soft eugenics” through his proposals to eliminate vaccines and lifesaving health services that would disproportionately impact certain populations.

Outside of politics, pop culture is also feeling a lot more Trump-friendly these days. From country artists dominating the charts from trad-wife content online to celebrities cozying up to the president, it seems like everyone is embracing the reign of MAGA and the tastes of his voter base. This has made every piece of pop culture, from influencers to ad campaigns, fodder for viewing through a MAGA lens. At the same time, the right has made efforts to insert itself into cultural moments and ephemera, from animation memes to superhero-movie discourse. More and more regular people are vigilant about the way pop culture can be used to push political messages. But it can be difficult to know what does and doesn’t deserve our energy and cultural attention.

Still, it’s hard not to feel like we’ve all been effectively “got” by a brand that most of us haven’t thought about since high school, one that has not sparked this much fervent discussion in its entire existence. But even American Eagle might not have put as much thought into the ads as its critics did. Peter Bray, founder and executive creative director at advertising agency Bray & Co, says the American Eagle ad may be more innocent than we assume, the result of a “first thought” concept as opposed to anything intentionally controversial.

“I don’t think in any way this was their intent,” Bray says. “They thought they had a lightbulb moment of creativity and didn’t think about the bigger cultural picture.”

Whether or not it meant it, American Eagle illuminated a winning engagement strategy for the second Trump era: Flirt with the public’s fear (or excitement) about fascism — with the help of Sydney Sweeney.