A couple of weeks ago, American Eagle launched a new ad campaign for its blue jeans line that featured actress Sydney Sweeney. In one of the ads, Sweeney weirdly broached the topic of genetics (she said, and I quote: “genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue”), but, for the most part, the ads seem to be about how great Sweeney’s posterior looks when she’s wearing the company’s denim.
Not long after the jeans ads aired, the internet collectively lost its mind.
One TikToker compared the ad to “Nazi propaganda” and, soon, NPR had dubbed it the “ad campaign that launched a thousand critiques.” CNN asked what America had “learned” from the Sweeney “situation.” Vox used the episode to wax eloquent about the “unsettling legacy of the blonde bombshell.” Dr. Phil and Lizzo both got upset—for different reasons—and America’s president, in a move that was very on-brand for him, issued a mispelling-strewn statement calling “Sidney”‘s ad the “HOTTEST.”
Meanwhile, a number of high-profile MAGA folks (including J.D. Vance, Charlie Kirk, and Ted Cruz) attempted to commandeer the topic, and use it to spur a backlash to the supposed backlash to Sweeney’s ads. To contextualize the recent drama, Rolling Stone magazine unveiled a timeline of America’s conservatives efforts to “claim” Sweeney for themselves as a cultural icon.
Based on the national conversation we were all just forced to have about Sweeney and her jeans, one would’ve thought MAGA’s collective lust for Sweeney could have easily been translated into hefty box office numbers for her newest movie, Americana. After all, if middle America is now collectively salivating over Sweeney, wouldn’t they want to go see her every chance they get? Apparently that’s not how things worked out, however.
Sweeney’s new movie only garnered an estimated $500,000 during its opening weekend, The Hollywood Reporter has noted. Film critics have been lukewarm to positive about the film, with Vulture calling it “a ’90s-style ensemble crime movie that engages in a sly exploration of the iconography and mythology we use to define the country” and RogerEbert.com noting that the film is not “particularly political” but that it is “blessed with a fairly strong cast.”
However, Americana‘s real problem would appear to be less the fact that its lead actress’s brand endorsements have stirred up controversy and more about the fact that most people haven’t heard of it. I go to the movies a lot, and am generally aware of the upcoming developments at my local cinema, and I can’t say that I’d even seen an ad for Americana or heard much about it prior to writing this article. The movie’s ad, which seems to offer a run-of-the-mill comedic crime romp, doesn’t have much of a partisan bent.
The internet is not a real place, but not infrequently, through a kind of alchemical magic, it can produce real-world events. Sometimes the web can stir up so much ideological turmoil that it spills offline and into the real world (just look at January 6th, if you need an example).
The problem is that no one really cared that deeply about the American Eagle ad in the first place. A few pissed off leftists and a gaggle of MAGA commentators attempted to get everyone to care about it, and the news media carried the story into our collective consciousness, if only to have something somewhat entertaining to write about instead of the incessant horrors visited upon us daily by the Trump administration. For Fox News, it was a way to avoid talking about the incessant horrors visited upon us daily by the Trump administration, in a different way. Still, despite the best efforts of a select few to make the Great Jeans War of 2025 happen, America’s heart just wasn’t in it. A recent poll from The Economist/YouGov showed only 12 percent of Americans found the ad “offensive.” We’ve been through a solid half-decade of having our minds messed with by the Extremely Online, and America may have completely exhausted its moral panics.
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