Unhinged Trolls Who Attacked Sydney Sweeney Ensured a Viral Sensation

Photo via American Eagle.

“All press is good press,” it’s often said, and Sydney Sweeney is reaping the benefits of being at the center of a recent kerfuffle over her ad campaign for American Eagle. There are reasonable arguments that the outrage is largely exaggerated, but both the actress and the clothing company are seeing a surge in popularity that is likely to bring them longer term financial advantages.

Sweeney’s ads promoting American Eagle denim products attracted immediate attention, but the online chatter swiftly shifted from the actress’s good looks to a debate over whether casting a blue-eyed blonde making puns about “great genes/jeans” was really a “Nazi dog whistle.” American Eagle has stood by their ad and muse, issuing a statement saying the ad campaign “is and always was about the jeans,” because “[g]reat jeans look good on everyone.”

The controversy has been heavily covered on Fox News, and even President Donald Trump has weighed in (in a rambling post that initially misspelled her name as “Sidney Sweeney,” but he deleted and reposted it).

Other commentators have bemoaned the controversy as yet another kerfuffle amplified more from the 24-hour news cycle and social media algorithms than the merit of any side of the debate.

“Can we not be weird about Sydney Sweeney for 5 seconds?” lamented Vulture senior writer Nick Jones in a column that argued that “culture-war flare-ups rarely have much to do with the object that’s actually being discussed,” as Sweeney was “being held responsible” for a “MAGA-coded image” that “has little to do with anything that [the] actual Sydney Sweeney has said or done.”

“If you are going to make fun of conservatives for being weird about Sydney Sweeney — something I am very much in favor of — it helps not to make their point for them by being weird about her in the opposite direction,” he wrote.

That hasn’t stopped Fox News from devoting significant air time to Sydney Sweeney and her “Great Jeans,” which critics have mocked as an attempt to distract from the Epstein files. Fox’s gigantic right-leaning audience plus Trump’s post meant that the company got millions of dollars of free promotion to millions of conservatives, despite the fact that “on paper, American Eagle is very ‘woke,'” as menswear writer Derek Guy pointed out.

American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. (NYSE:AEO) enjoyed a boost to its stock price Monday, surging by over 15 percent in the aftermath of Trump’s post and by nearly 23 percent as the afternoon rolled on.

Screenshot via Google.

American Eagle had a more than $68 million operating loss in the first quarter of 2025. If Q2 is sunnier, this stock price surge and the viral ad campaign amplified by countless minutes of television airtime and column inches will undoubtedly be a significant factor.

The longterm benefit to both Sweeney and her denim-peddling sponsor may lie in the massive surge of attention that luckily enough seems to be focusing on the elements both benefit from highlighting.

American Eagle has not appeared to do anything to invite Fox or Trump’s cheerleading of their ad campaign. Nonetheless, they’ve managed to get both to ignore the clothing company’s past support for diversity and other “woke” causes and now have a president who campaigned on “America First” and imposing heavy tariffs on foreign goods to promote a company that manufactures its clothes overseas.

A recent analysis by AllAmerican.org, a website that supports “Made in the U.S.A.” goods, reported that American Eagle clothing was made in factories based in China, Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand, and Indonesia.

The Google Trends data for both Sweeney and American Eagle show just how strong the spike in their popularity, interest, and name recognition has been.

Sweeney began acting as a child in 2009, first with bit parts in films and guest roles on television shows like Criminal Minds and Grey’s Anatomy. She had a recurring role during the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale in 2018 and then had her breakthrough role the next year as Cassie Howard on Euphoria. The HBO series was a smash hit, and since then, Sweeney has had a number of critically-acclaimed roles that were also ratings or box office successes, including another HBO project, The White Lotus, and Anyone But You, a 2023 romcom in which she co-starred with Glen Powell and served as executive producer.

Nothing Sweeney has done in her career so far has generated the interest that these denim ads have. The longterm Google Trends for searches for her name shows a teeny twitch upwards when Euphoria premiered in June 2019 and Sweeney’s season of The White Lotus in January 2021, then bigger upticks when the Euphoria’s second season kicked off, Anyone But You premiered, and her Saturday Night Live debut last year.

Screenshot via Google.

The growth in searches for Sweeney just over the two weeks dwarfs all of those by a factor of more than 6-to-1, and the story has yet to fade from the headlines.

Screenshot via Google.

American Eagle has been in the national consciousness longer than the 27-year-old Sweeney, and gone through the ups and downs typical of a large retailer, but like Sweeney, the company has surged on Google Trends far past any previously measured peak.

Screenshot via Google.

The end result is that both Sweeney and American Eagle have dramatically improved their name recognition and popularity in less than a month. The “Q Score” calculated by Marketing Evaluations, Inc. measures the awareness and appeal of a brand or celebrity. It’s still early, but by drastically increasing their popularity without a major hit to their likability, the Q scores for Sweeney and American Eagle denim would both improve. That means increased sales for American Eagle and a stronger position at the negotiating table for Sweeney next time she’s offered a role to demand a higher salary and gross points.

Are we incentivizing savvy celebrities and brands to purposefully invite culture war controversies to line their pockets? It’s certainly not a new idea — past generations will remember their parents’ horror at Elvis Presley’s hip-shaking dance moves or Madonna’s Like a Virgin video — but the global reach and ever-present nature of the internet amplifies the stakes.