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The way Sydney Sweeney held her face for the entirety of White Lotus Season 1 is how I feel every time we have to talk about her. It feels as if we’re always talking about her: her box-office performances, her dating life, her apparent links to conservatism. Since her breakthrough in Euphoria in 2019, she has spent most of her 20s as a lightning rod for discussion about the male gaze. She’s been treated mostly as a great body and a periodical meme. Tough, especially when your original sin was merely being hot.
What else is she supposed to do except capitalize on the attention when she can? She’s appeared in advertisements for Laneige and Armani Beauty and Bai water. In 2025 she launched a “Bathwater Bliss” soap for men with Dr. Squatch, ostensibly made with her own bathwater. It sold out immediately and hit the reseller market for hundreds more. Good for her, frankly.
But some of her other business ventures have, incredibly, ended with her being accused of being a white supremacist. Her American Eagle ad became a defining joke of 2025 for her slithering around in denim while purring about how “genes are passed down from parents to offspring.” Enough people online thought that it was a dog whistle about race, and that she was quietly promoting eugenics as some fascist agitprop. That ad, plus reporting that she’s a registered Republican who attended a Scooter Braun–organized meetup with former Israeli hostages, has put Sweeney on the defensive. “I’ve never been here to talk about politics,” she told Cosmopolitan last month in response to a question about her “MAGA Barbie” nickname. “I’ve always been here to make art, so this is just not a conversation I want to be at the forefront of.”
Now she’s back with another product to help us understand who she is: a lingerie line called Syrn, and pronounced “siren,” because that’s what art is all about.
“I wanted to build a lingerie brand that feels like it understands women instead of talking at them,” she told Elle last month. But what does Sweeney—or Jeff Bezos, one of the litany of male investors in the Coatue tech fund that’s backing this particular enterprise—know about talking to women? Having one specific type of female body doesn’t mean that you know how to design for them. A woman with the most idealized body among white Americans, similarly, isn’t necessarily poised to know what the masses are interested in. Syrn sizing starts at 30A and goes only to 42DDD/F, which is a bummer, since the average American bra size hovers around a D or DD.
As a woman with pendulous breasts, I think there’s something insulting about Sydney Sweeney moving through Hollywood as if she invented having boobs. I actually invented it. I was the first woman to have breasts, before Sweeney was even alive! My heaving and natural 36Ds are, of course, the first and only boobs to exist. Who better to review Syrn than I, someone who is actually just legs, arms, and areola.
Sweeney has launched Syrn with two of four product lines; you can currently buy from Seductress and Romantic, while Playful and Comfy are forthcoming. “From the heart, brains and boobs of Sydney Sweeney,” the website cheerfully chirps at you, eschewing the Oxford comma and making it sound as if her brain and boobs are mashed together into one pulsating, confused, plush organ. The day the brand launched, sizing was at a premium, so I ordered whatever I could find in my sizes: The Show Off Unlined Plunge Bra, the Fantasy Lace Halter Bodysuit, and the Seduction Lightly Lined Plunge Bra, each for $89. They’re reasonably priced, slightly cheaper than what you might get from Dita Von Teese’s line and slightly more than from Savage x Fenty.
And, look, all the items are … fine. There’s nothing distinct about them, nothing that separates them from the kinds of pieces you’d have found at Victoria’s Secret 10 or 15 years ago. The women’s intimates space is crowded, especially with celebrity faces: Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, Lizzo. Sweeney lacks the clear futuristic minimalism of Kardashian’s branding, or Rihanna’s edgy-sexy-punky Savage, or Von Teese’s classic cabaret-style collections. A celebrity line lives and dies by the celebrity promoting it, and just how convincing they are of their messaging. SKIMS works because a merkin bikini bottom is, actually, something for the increasingly extraterrestrial Kardashian to wear: She is selling you the dream of being a fashion weirdo. Savage looks like much of what Rihanna might wear in a music video: She is selling you the dream of being the baddest bitch in the room. Sweeney, conversely, has merely shown us boobs and asked us to fill in the blanks about what it all means.
Syrn’s designs are pretty basic—black lace over nude illusion, slightly thicker straps to help keep them from cutting into your skin, heart-shaped fasteners. There are a few items that might elicit an Oh, cute while shopping online, but there is no reinvention of the brassiere here. And while I understand that her initials are merely unfortunate, I perhaps would not fasten small silver SS charms onto the center of my bras if I had just done an interview with Cosmopolitan about how I’m definitely not a racist.
But hey—they all fit. That’s more than you can expect from most celebrity lines, and at barely $90 an item, they’re not such an insurmountable splurge for lingerie. They’re not comfortable, but that’s not Sweeney’s fault: There are no comfortable bras, because bras are not intended to be comfortable. I’m not arguing with you about this—I, after all, invented having boobs.
Syrn is attempting ’50s and ’60s nostalgia in its design, something that, generally speaking, is well-trodden territory for women’s clothes. It feels like the kind of stuff you’d see Sabrina Carpenter in. But the key difference is that Carpenter’s branding is demonstrably rooted in irony; she sings songs about men being useless and about seeking the world’s best orgasm, all while she wears nighties and negligees. For Sweeney, there is no dichotomy between brand and sense of self. She has offered her audience no clear personal ethos, and so all we have to go off are a few movies, a couple of seasons of an HBO show about teenagers doing whippets at a strip club—I think? I have … never seen Euphoria—and these brand activations, which serve only to solidify what little we may know about her.
Women can usually tell when something sold and marketed to us is actually for us. Often, it seems as if we’re buying things for the husband we’re supposed to have. Sweeney is the kind of female celebrity that feels designed for straight men, and so many of her advertisements feel targeted to them too. Even when she’s displaying a product mostly for women, like lingerie, it still seems like something women buy in order to appeal to men. Her bathwater soap sold out not just because it was perverted (and smart!) but because it was for her audience: men who like her.
There is no moral or ethical failure in being a woman who can sell something to men. In fact, it’s your feminist duty to wring them dry. But Sweeney lacks the sense of humor or even the raw sex appeal required to make a typical lingerie line seem singular, and she lacks the female audience to make this land. Instead, it just feels like the inevitable next step in an actor’s capitalistic dependencies.
