Did American Eagle apologize for the "combined impact" of Sydney Sweeney's "blue eyes, blonde hair, and general hotness" in the July 2025 ad campaign? No, that's not true: The company's official pages did not show such a statement. No credible media organization cited it as an authentic response to the social media debate about the campaign.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on July 30, 2025. It opened:
🚨BREAKING: American Eagle has issued a response to the drama surrounding their add including Sydney Sweeney! 🤣🤣🤣
The post shared an image that read:
To Whom It May Concern,
We sincerely apologize for featuring Sydney Sweeney in our recent advertisement. In hindsight, we underestimated the combined impact of her blue eyes, blonde hair, and general hotness.Also, we did not realize how big her boobs would be.Our marketing team has been sent to denim sensitivity training.Thank you for your feedback. Please stop emailing us.(We're still trying to recover from the group chat fallout.)AMERICAN EAGLE
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: screenshot of a post by tan_brass on x.com)
As of this writing, the only official press release about the Sydney Sweeney ad campaign (archived here) available on the American Eagle website announced (archived here) its start on July 23, 2025.
Lead Stories checked the company's accounts on Facebook (archived here), X (archived here), Threads, Instagram and LinkedIn (archived here), but none of them contained the statement in question.
Searches for the specific language of the purported press releases across news articles on Google (archived here) and Yahoo (archived here) did not yield any matches.
However, textual searches led to an account on Facebook that published a larger version of the image featuring the actress and the "statement" on July 29, 2025. The bottom left corner displayed the name associated with that account of a self-described digital creator, but that was covered by a different background in the later versions of the composite image:
(Image source: screenshot of Karim Jovian's post on Facebook.com)
On the same day, July 29, 2025, at least one more page published another made-up statement (archived here) falsely attributed to American Eagle.
