“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” That line has triggered an unusually frenzied response online after American Eagle launched its latest ad campaign starring the Gen-Z scream queen. In a series of short clips, Sweeney lounges on the floor with a German shepherd puppy, cruises in a Mustang, and smolders for the camera — all while showing off her American Eagle denim.

But it was one line that truly grabbed the internet’s attention: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair, personality and even eye color. My genes are blue.”

Progressive culture warriors have said that this wordplay is subliminally valorizing a narrow Eurocentric beauty standard, and even promoting eugenics and Nazi propaganda. They argue it’s not a coincidence that Sweeney, a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, thin and attractive woman was picked to be the face of American jeans/genes. An MSNBC producer even wrote that the American Eagle advert reflects “an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness, conservatism and capitalist exploitation”.

Taken in conjunction with the general “vibes shift” following Trump 2.0, progressives are becoming fearfully cognizant of the fact that they’re now on the backfoot in the culture war. Wokeness is not in pole position like it was in 2020; anti-wokeness now has the initiative. Conservative culture warriors have taken the opportunity to herald the “return” of normal beauty standards and declare “America is back!”

Of course, the advert is not Nazi propaganda. Suggestions that it is are hysterical. It was clever wordplay. Saying Sydney Sweeney has good genes because she’s conventionally attractive is not saying she’s part of the master race. It’s like meeting a tall and athletic person and saying “you must’ve had good genes to become that”. A non-white beauty like Zendaya or Rihanna could’ve been in her place and that line would still apply. Because it’s true. In this instance, it was a white woman.

Despite the backlash against the ad campaign, it has, thus far, been successful for American Eagle. The company’s stock value surged 18% last week, adding as much as $400 million to the company’s value, raising it to the status of a $2 billion company.

Sweeney herself is tight-lipped about her political and social views, and she certainly isn’t stirring up eugenics or a fascist notion of aesthetics. She’s simply making money through selling her sex appeal — as many female celebrities do.

But that hasn’t stopped her from becoming a blank canvas onto which both sides project their politics — some progressives assume she’s Right-wing because a few people wore MAGA hats at her mother’s birthday party, while anti-woke conservatives claim her as their own for supposedly courting the male gaze with her overt sexuality.

Sweeney has become a political fixation in recent years—particularly for the anti-woke Right. They’ve cast her as a throwback to the idealized all-American beauty: white, thin, blonde, blue-eyed. In their eyes, she embodies a pre-woke femininity that’s been erased by progressive puritanism and the leveling impulse of body positivity. As White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt put it in a now-viral selfie: “Make America Blonde Again.”

Just look at how Sweeney is styled in the American Eagle ad: the no-makeup makeup, the clean and understated look, the accessible “girl next door.” It’s an ideal that feels aspirational but attainable — broadly appealing, not designed to please a niche.

She is representative, in Bridget Phetasy’s words, of “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack” that has “been stamped out of existence, a creature shamed to the brink of extinction”. Sweeney’s look stands in sharp contrast to the dominant beauty trends of the past decade: the rise of “ethnically ambiguous” aesthetics and the celebration of curvier, “thicc” body types popularized by the Kardashians — features long associated with black women but co-opted and commodified in mainstream pop culture.

Advertisement very often taps into what is popular in American culture at any given time. In 2019, when wokeness was ascendant, American Eagle advertised their jeans with a black “body positive” model. Given the success American Eagle has already achieved from the Sydney Sweeney advert in 2025, it shows that the shift to anti-woke, or non-woke, erotic messaging is paying dividends. Sex and irony sell well and it is effective. There’s no reason to think it won’t be taken up by more companies in due course.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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