I've been trying to craft a sufficiently wry response to American Eagle's recent eugenics-adjacent advertisement featuring professional pretty-person Sydney Sweeney, but I keep circling back to the depressing mundanity of it all. Here's a clothing company that my middle-school self desperately wanted to shop at—had I possessed both the allowance and the social capital—partnering with an actress whose relevance seems to exist in inverse proportion to her actual talent. There's something perfectly American about this pairing, and I don't mean that as a compliment (or a pun).

The ad itself presumably began with a conference room full of white MBAs congratulating themselves on their "genes vs. jeans" wordplay, complete with references to eye color and a callback to Brooke Shields' Calvin Klein campaign. Someone should have interrupted this mutual circle jerk to ask whether invoking genetic superiority while advertising denim might land somewhere between "ill-advised" and "historically unconscionable," but apparently that someone was taking a very long lunch.

I'm not going to rehash the well-documented history of eugenics or explain why Sweeney's scripted musings sound like white supremacist dog whistles—that requires more energy than my usual snark allows. Nor will I catalog the ways Brooke Shields was exploited as a minor, making any reference to her infamous campaign an entry for advertising's Do Not Do list. But I will note that American Eagle kept the ad up long enough to see who rallied to its defense: white supremacists, racists, anti-Semites, and their various political enablers. If "you are the company you keep" is my first rule in life, my second is "if I wouldn't take advice from you, I sure as fuck wouldn't take criticism from you."

When the predictable backlash arrived, American Eagle issued a half-hearted apology claiming it was "all about the jeans." Which is both true and utterly beside the point—it wasn't about their product so much as their quarterly projections. The company I once viewed as the sophisticated alternative to Abercrombie & Fitch (the cool girls shopped A&E; the insufferable ones went to A&F) now sits in mall limbo alongside the corpses of H&M, Forever 21, and other fast-fashion casualties. They know they're dying a slow retail death, so why not manufacture some controversy for short-term gains?

And it worked. Stock prices jumped, inventory moved, mission accomplished.

All of this sturm und drang over ill-fitting jeans that Sweeney was ostensibly hawking for charity—though you'd never have known about the charitable angle since it got buried beneath the genetic superiority messaging. Priorities, apparently.

I'm not particularly fond of Sweeney's acting, though I adore Euphoria (yes, even the second season—fight me). She's arguably the weakest performer in an otherwise stellar ensemble, her storyline the least compelling, but she does what she can with her limited range. Then again, mediocre actors succeed all the time. For every Sydney Sweeney, I can name five men with equivalent talent and superior acclaim: Robert De Niro playing himself in perpetuity, Leonardo DiCaprio's wooden earnestness, Jack Nicholson's shameless mugging, Nicolas Cage's theatrical overreach, Matthew McConaughey's accent-limited charm. All Oscar winners. All coasting on charisma and good timing.

The misogyny directed at Sweeney is palpable and predictable—she's attractive, amiably nude, politically neutral, and theatrically unremarkable. She's set herself up as a lightning rod for resentment simply by existing in public while possessing breasts and ambition.

There's nothing inherently wrong with leveraging your assets for advancement. She wants to sell bathwater-adjacent soap? Fine. Lingerie for an audience of men who don't buy lingerie? Whatever works. Sydney either understands her brand or she's being expertly managed—probably a bit of both. But here's where my defense ends: there's a problem with lending your image to campaigns that flirt with racial superiority, and there's an even bigger problem with treasuring your political neutrality so much that you remain silent when literal Nazis praise you. Unless, of course, she's fine with that endorsement.

Here's the thing about modern celebrity: we've reached the point where famous people aren't really people anymore. Unless they've survived decades in the business, they're brands with heartbeats, and brands don't have consciences—they have profit margins. I don't understand why we expect Sydney Sweeney or any celebrity to possess morals and ethics when they're primarily running businesses. The parasocial relationships we form with fame are baffling—as if we expect our favorite pretty people to align perfectly with our values simply because they're pretty and in things we enjoy watching.

But Sweeney will be fine. She'll continue booking work until Hollywood decides she's too old at thirty-five, and hopefully she'll have diversified her Nazi denim money sufficiently to retire comfortably. The rest of us will find new celebrities to project our expectations onto, American Eagle will continue its slow fade into retail irrelevance, and somewhere in a conference room, another group of white MBAs will congratulate themselves on their next brilliant campaign.

The banality of it all is perhaps the most depressing part—evil doesn't always announce itself with dramatic flourishes. Sometimes it just wears jeans and calls itself marketing.