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Culture

Sydney Sweeney will not be taking your questions about the American Eagle controversy

Anyone who asks her about that jeans ad can expect a right hook

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Sydney Sweeney will not be taking your questions about the American Eagle controversy
Photo by Cindy Ord/VF25/Vanity Fair/Getty Images

Sydney Sweeney will walk the red carpet this afternoon at the premiere of her boxing biopic, Christy—but she didn’t wait to arrive in Toronto to warn off any would-be gossip hounds. In an interview with Vanity Fair, the actor slash professional scandal magnet put the media on blast: “I am there to support my movie and the people involved in making it, and I’m not there to talk about jeans.”

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For the uninformed: the jeans she’s talking about are the ones she wore in an ad for American Eagle, in which she appeared under the headline: “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans.” That line was, of course, a bit of wordplay on the phrase “good genes,” and with Sweeney being a conventionally attractive blonde white woman…well, controversy ensued. Critics called it an offensive reference to white supremacy. Then the critics’ critics were like, Put a sock in it, snowflakes. And then the original critics accused the campaign of intentionally stoking their own outrage. (Rage-bait advertising: it’s a thing.)

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The pop culture scandal of the summer came with a predictable ping-pong of conspiracy theories: Sweeney is secretly a Republican. No, wait, she’s a Democratic plant. Then it came out that she is, in fact, a registered Republican in Florida. Even Donald Trump weighed in on MAGA’s new muse. Then Sweeney was on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. But she has never addressed the controversy, and she isn’t about to start in Toronto. “The movie’s about Christy, and that’s what I’ll be there to talk about,” she told Vanity Fair before going on to talk about how the boxing she does in the movie is the real deal: “We’re actually punching each other.” Plucky TIFF reporters may want to take that as a warning.

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Courtney Shea is a freelance journalist in Toronto. She started her career as an intern at Toronto Life and continues to contribute frequently to the publication, including her 2022 National Magazine Award–winning feature, “The Death Cheaters,” her regular Q&As and her recent investigation into whether Taylor Swift hung out at a Toronto dive bar (she did not). Courtney was a producer and writer on the 2022 documentary The Talented Mr. Rosenberg, based on her 2014 Toronto Life magazine feature “The Yorkville Swindler.”

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