Sydney Sweeney says she is ‘against hate’ after American Eagle response
Sydney Sweeney has more to say about participating in her now controversial denim campaign with American Eagle.
“I was honestly surprised by the reaction. I did it because I love the jeans and the brand,” said 28-year-old Sweeney People in an interview published on Friday, December 5. “I do not support the positions some people chose to join the campaign.”
She continued, “Many have given me motives and labels that are simply not true.”
The Maid star was the face of American Eagle’s denim campaign when it launched this summer and featured the tagline “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” The ad used a play on words using the words “jean” and “gene,” sparking outrage on social media that AE and Sweeney were promoting eugenics. (Eugenics is a widely discredited belief that aims to improve human genetics and is often associated with white supremacy.)
Both AE and Sweeney denied the allegations and defended their intention to sell only jeans. The actress, for her part, emphasized that again People that she always tries to “lead with kindness.”
“Anyone who knows me knows that I always try to bring people together. I am against hate and division,” Sweeney told the newspaper. “My position in the past has been never to respond to negative or positive press, but recently I have come to realize that my silence on this issue has only widened the divide, not closed it. I hope this new year will bring more attention to what unites us rather than what divides us.”
Sweeney previously broke her silence on the controversial ad last month and revealed to GQ that she had never considered the possibility that the slogan would be so divisive.
“It’s not that I didn’t have that feeling, but I didn’t really think about it, I didn’t think about any of it. I just put my phone away. I was filming every day,” she said. GQ in a November profile. “I’m filming Euphoria [season 3 now], so I work 16 hours a day and I don’t really take my phone on set so I work and then I go home and sleep. I haven’t actually seen much of it.”
Sweeney, who added that she wears jeans and a T-shirt “literally” every day [her] life”, was also not bothered by the reaction.
“I think if I have an issue that I want to talk about, people will hear it,” she said GQ, and also noted that she was aware of the business side of the campaign. “I was aware of the numbers. So when I saw that all the headlines about store visits having dropped by a certain percentage, none of it was true. It was all made up, but no one could say anything because [the company was] in their quiet period.”
She concluded, “It was all just a lot of talk, and because at the end of the day I knew what that ad was for, and it was a great pair of jeans, it didn’t affect me one way or the other.”
American Eagle also released a statement about the campaign.
“‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and has always been about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story,” the retailer wrote in an August post shared to social media. “We continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, in their own way. Great jeans look good on everyone.”
