A pal of mine has a teenaged daughter who is my size, and the other day she handed me some jeans that were practically brand new. They were great jeans — a term that got Sydney Sweeney in trouble some months ago– but in this case I mean quality denim that was only a season or two old. Her daughter didn’t wear them anymore, my friend lamented, because they were high waisted. That’s because it’s “low rise season,” a concept Ms. Sweeney and American Eagle seem very on board with.
In fact, Sweeney is back and touting jeans for the brand several months after a brouhaha comparing “great jeans” to “great genes” and led to accusations of Nazism brewing online. The jeans sold like hotcakes despite the backlash, and the brand has continued working with the actress in the time since, with Sweeney dropping looks at denim minidresses and more. Her latest?
Yes, it’s low-rise jeans, and it’s hardly the first time she’s worn them. We’ve caught her out on the streets of New York in low-rise denim looks from MiuMiu and more in 2026, but the pro to these AE lines is that they aren’t aspirational. Anyone can dive in and give them a whirl.
Continuing the trend that everything old becomes new again, the early aughts are being heavily represented in American Eagle’s latest jeans line. Sydney Sweeney looks great in low rise, but I feel it’s only a matter of time before the whale tale trend makes a comeback, and I am very much not looking forward to it.
Meanwhile, Sydney Sweeney has made a lot of fashion splashes in the last 12 months outside of people getting angry about her wearing jeans for a campaign she literally had no control over. She and Amanda Seyfried “dressed to kill” for The Housemaid press tour, and then she was a long, cool woman in a black dress a few months later for Euphoria. She’s also been excellent at cross-promoting, wearing corsets on the red carpet before creating one for her own lingerie brand.
The actress has been down under filming Gundam this summer, but she does have a large swathe of additional projects coming up. I doubt we’ll see her in jeans on the red carpet, though I do appreciate a casual carpet event, but we should see her trying her hand at more celebrity fashion trends in the coming months. I’m just going to keep my fingers crossed that thongs don’t start making a major reappearance.