Sydney Sweeney is apologising to no one

Sydney Sweeney has just delivered a masterclass in the art of telling people to mind their own business. In a new GQ interview, the actress refused to comment on the controversy surrounding her American Eagle jeans ad, despite repeated questioning from her interlocutor.

The ad in question featured a jeans-clad Sweeney performing various activities in a state of unbothered attractiveness. The tagline read, ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans’ – a play on the word ‘genes’.

This was enough to spark a confected furore among the still woke. Since Sweeney is white, these victimhood junkies naturally took the ad as glaring proof of American Eagle’s supposed alignment with white-supremacist thinking. The ad apparently had ‘eugenicist undertones’.

During the interview, Katherine Stoeffel, GQ’s features director, was determined to get Sweeney to open up about the backlash to the ad campaign and no doubt say sorry for it, too. With her brow creased in faux-compassion, Stoeffel posed the question with the air of an insufferable children’s therapist, offering Sweeney an ‘opportunity’ to address concerns over her ad. ‘Maybe, specifically in this political climate’, she said with a simpering smile, ‘like, white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority?’.

Had this been a few years ago, and had the celebrity opposite Stoeffel been someone less unflappable than Sweeney, we might have anticipated him or her to issue a grovelling apology. To express contrition for deviating from the sacred creed of ‘progressivism’. But not Sweeney. She responded to Stoeffel’s needling with a lazy blink, followed by the line: ‘When I have something important to say, people will hear.’ And that was that.

After years of watching celebrities take the knee, ‘use their platform to speak up’ and constantly pledge to ‘do better’, seeing a star like Sweeney refuse to wrestle with the pigs is wonderfully refreshing.

‘I did a jean ad’, she said, unfazed. ‘The reaction definitely was a surprise, but I love jeans. All I wear are jeans.’ Sweeney is not being obtuse here. She will certainly be aware of the rabid campaign to smear her as Nazi Barbie. But she’s drawing a boundary. Not everyone in the public eye needs to toe the politically correct line. She has her views, and she doesn’t feel the need to make them public.

For all the talk of her other, more prominent charms, Sydney Sweeney has displayed something all too rare in modern Hollywood – a desire to keep it classy. Other celebs should take note.

Georgina Mumford is an editorial assistant at spiked.