That’s the gist of a statement the clothing company put out on Instagram today, offering a flat “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans,” and stating “We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way.” Of course, that might feel slightly disingenuous, given that the ad campaign has had a lot less to do with the pants themselves, and more with the camera ogling a game Sweeney as she deploys some tired punwork about how “genes are passed down by her parents,” and her “jeans are blue.” But the basic gist is “We’re not apologizing, but we would also like to be left out of this. (Buy more pants.)”
The controversy surrounding the campaign, as we noted earlier today when JD Vance started grunting about it, has tied neatly into the American right’s general weirdness about Sweeney, who they tend to hold up as a sort of blonde-haired Cleavage Jesus, come to redeem a generation daring to suggest the conventional beauty standards she embodies may not be the end-all, be-all of human attractiveness. Both the ads, and the Republican fervor around Sweeney, seem to operate on the basic assumption that she is so attractive that anyone who does not immediately turn into a giant wolf with its heart pumping dangerously out of their chest upon looking at her must be lying, or, at the very least, lying about how much they want to buy her pants. Meanwhile, some online critics have, in fact, noted that making a big deal out of the “incredible” jeans/genes of a blonde, blue-eyed woman who right-wingers are obsessed with might carry some uncomfortable Aryan overtones, which guys like Vance have gleefully gripped like they were the armrests of a particularly comely Chesterfield, in their hopes of painting their political opponents as overly sensitive.
Sweeney—who’s said a lot more in the past about her need to hustle with brand sponsorships to make money while the making’s good than about politics— has so far resisted any pressure to say anything about the matter herself.
