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In many ways, 2024 felt like one big victory lap for Sydney Sweeney. Since her romantic comedy Anyone but You became the surprise hit of the winter, the 27-year-old has been making the most of her moment: She hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time in March. She secured a $7.5 million paycheck for an upcoming role, making her one of the best-paid actresses of her cohort. Just weeks ago, she landed a coveted spot on the cover of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue. Amid all this success, it would have been easy to miss one of the other things Sweeney did during her annus mirabilis: She promoted a very ugly pair of shoes.
In August, HeyDude, a brand best known for its boat shoes, named Sweeney its global spokeswoman, or “director of Dude.” At the time, I was just one of many people who scratched their head over why one of the hottest actresses around was lending her star power to these boxy monstrosities. Sweeney said nothing, letting the photos she posted on Instagram of her showing off her tush while her feet were ensconced in HeyDudes do the talking.
I probably would have forgotten all about the mystery of the hot girl and the hideous shoes if it didn’t essentially repeat itself a month and change later, when Sweeney reemerged with another out-of-left-field product to sell: This time, it was Dr. Squatch men’s body wash, and the shamelessness was part of the pitch. “Hello, you dirty little boys,” she said in one video, sitting in a bathtub, her décolletage peeking out from under copious bubbles. “Are you interested in my body … wash?”
I couldn’t make sense of these two wildly embarrassing ads right in a row. After years of steady work, Sweeney finally got a toehold on the A-list this year. Was it really worth risking it all for the quick buck appearing in these ads would generate? It’s not that I was taken aback by the thought of a celebrity shilling for something; it’s more that there’s a hierarchy to these things, and you’d expect someone like Sweeney to have her own brand, as so many celebs do these days—or at the very least to hold out for a Skims campaign. Shouldn’t she and her team be being more thoughtful about curating her image than the average mercenary influencer who takes any deal that comes their way?
At some point, I made my way to Sweeney’s Instagram account and discovered that HeyDude and Dr. Squatch aren’t the half of it. She also has deals with a skin care line, a hair care line, a beverage, a phone—the list goes on. Is there anything she won’t sell? Hence those cheeky Dr. Squatch ads. It’s almost a joke at this point. She’s alluded to it in interviews: She’s got money on her mind, and she’s strategic about her career. And it seems to be working for her, with no discernible impact on her ability to book roles and win over fans. What if I was the one being old-fashioned about this? Could we all stand to embrace Sweeney’s hustler mindset?
There was an easy shortcut to doing so: I could buy everything she’s selling. So I did. I ordered a pair of the ugly shoes and a bottle of the men’s body wash. At Sephora, I bought products from brands I would normally be lucky enough to encounter only via free sample. I looked at, like, five different supermarkets for the drink she plugs. My superiors warned me not to go too crazy, so I stopped after I spent about $250, meaning I didn’t get any Miu Miu clothes or Jimmy Choo shoes out of this experiment, to name two of the more high-end brands Sweeney has worked with (though I do wonder how Jimmy Choo feels about Sweeney’s other footwear sponsorship).
How did it go? Let’s start with what I regard as Sweeney’s original sin: the HeyDudes. Browsing the company’s website for a pair, I remember aiming to find the most inconspicuous-seeming ones I could. If I had to wear these shoes that people online likened to wearing a loaf of bread on each foot, I at least would not be wearing Mean Girls–themed loaves. This is how I settled on the “Wendy Stretch Sox” in navy, which retail for $59.99. It didn’t matter, though: They were ugly however you sliced them. I thought the problem was the enormous toe box, but others couldn’t stop talking about the laces, which one person in my life insisted protrude out of the shoes in a startingly similar manner to the way Shrek’s ears stick out of his head. (Good thing I didn’t get them in green.)
I felt embarrassed every time I put them on. I wore them to the office only once, on a day when I didn’t have any plans afterward, so it would matter less that the theme of my ensemble was “I give up.” This plan backfired when an invitation to see a movie with a friend materialized: I said yes, but first I felt the need to warn her about what my feet would look like. Who doesn’t love a shoe that requires an advance apology? In truth, they were also just not practical for me—I’m walking city streets most of the time. My feet get cold.
Sweeney, in contrast, seems like someone who might have a reason to wear boat shoes. On the HeyDude website, there’s a little section where she talks about her work as “director of Dude,” and she mentions that she recently tried wakesurfing. She writes: “Being the Director of Dude is truly just embracing the power of being a woman, and being able to do absolutely anything I set my mind to, and showing others that you can do anything too if you just want to try it out.” That doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, but you could argue that saying yes to seemingly every single brand that approaches her is an example of Sweeney living out this philosophy. And in all seriousness, these are far from the first ugly shoes to catch on. New silhouettes in fashion always look weird and ugly until they don’t. HeyDude’s corporate parent is actually the grandfather of ugly shoe brands, Crocs, which acquired the company in 2022 for $2.5 billion. Sales have been down since Sweeney signed on, but Crocs recently installed the marketing executive who’s widely credited with making Stanley Cups and the infamous clogs themselves cool. He told the Wall Street Journal that he believes getting young women on board will be key to the brand’s success. Given his track record, I wouldn’t bet against him.
Dr. Squatch’s products are technically even more not for me than boat shoes, given that they’re aimed exclusively at men, but I didn’t let that stop me. Sweeney signed on with the decade-old grooming brand to hawk its new body wash, which is described on its website as “the natural liquid soap so epic it’ll instantly become your main squeeze.” It’s available in the scents Wood Barrel Bourbon, Pine Tar, Fresh Falls, and Coconut Castaway. My natural inclination was to choose Coconut Castaway, but feeling as if I should make a more masculine choice to really commune with the purpose of the product, I opted for the Pine Tar ($15). It’s been … completely serviceable. I sometimes notice the little beads from it stuck under my bathroom mat, but apart from that, no complaints. Body wash seems like one of those things that really don’t vary that strongly from brand to brand, in my experience. Which is, I suppose, why you hire someone like Sydney Sweeney to star in ridiculous ads when you’re looking to promote a new one.
That much made sense to me. I was still less clear on why Sweeney said yes.
A couple of years ago, as Sweeney’s star was rising, she got what may have been her first taste of mainstream backlash for the way she spoke about money in a Hollywood Reporter interview. She worked so much, she said at the time, because she couldn’t afford not to. She doesn’t have generational wealth, and being a Hollywood star in Los Angeles—multimillion-dollar home and all—is expensive. This prompted an online pile-on (you are rich, lady!), then somewhat convincing defenses. Everyone moved on, and Sweeney got bigger and bigger.
That is partly why I embarked on my project—don’t the bigger paychecks obviate the need for all of the piddly brand deals? Isn’t a certain air of exclusivity part of the A-list package?
Not anymore, Allen Adamson, co-founder of Metaforce, a branding consultancy, told me. “It’s become less frowned upon in Hollywood. It used to be, if you were a hot actor or performer and you started to do this, you’re selling out.”
Now there’s barely any such thing as selling out. The media landscape has become so fragmented that celebrities can do multiple ads secure in the knowledge that most people will never see them. “It used to be, if you did a celebrity endorsement, you were on one of the networks, mass exposure,” Adamson said. “Now lots of the stuff that certainly Sweeney is doing is really hypertargeted. I think you are seeing all these things, but I think the average consumer is not seeing her holistically; they’re seeing bits and pieces of her in their little segment, in their category.
“My sense is her activity has gone up dramatically in the last eight or 12 months as her career has taken off a little bit,” Adamson went on. “It’s not surprising that the companies are going after her. There’s such pressure from these marketers to get noticed that if they are somebody as hot as she is with this audience, they’d rather get in early.” He estimated that Sweeney is getting paid six-figure sums for each of these sorts of deals.
If Sweeney were going to hypertarget me, it would be with her brand partnerships that don’t feel so random. In the fashion and beauty space, I had an easier time seeing where they made sense and seemed mutually beneficial. Of course Armani wants to be associated with Sweeney, and Sweeney with Armani. Sweeney frequently credits Armani Beauty for her red-carpet makeup on Instagram, but because getting enough $42 concealer and $39 blush and so on to do my whole face would add up to something untenable, I opted for just one product, the $38 Prisma Glass lip gloss, which Sweeney has specifically done ads for and shouted out in the shade Cherry Glaze. It’s probably the most expensive lip product I’ve ever owned, and maybe ever will own, and while I do think it’s nicer than my e.l.f. lip oil, I’m not sure it’s a full $30 nicer.
Sweeney also serves as the global ambassador for Laneige, a Korean skin care brand. Her presence in ads for its Bouncy & Firm line earlier this year compelled me to buy a set (for $34) of the three products in said line: a mini plumping lip treatment, a mini radiance-boosting mask, and an “eye brightening” sleeping mask. I tried them a bunch of times before bed, and I can’t say they had any perceptible effect on my skin. (This partnership might make more sense than most, but at least men’s body wash does what it says it’s going to.) I felt slightly more positively about the Kérastase products I tried, Kérastase being another company for which Sweeney is a “brand ambassador.” Here’s an ad Sweeney filmed for the company’s Première line (for “damaged hair”) this year; boy, does she say the word calcium weirdly in it. If I’m not a skin care girl, I’m kind of a hair girl after starting to do a curly-hair routine a few years ago, so I bought both the hair oil ($30 for a mini) and a sampler set of the Première line ($54) containing a preshampoo treatment, shampoo, and a hair mask. The instructions were Byzantine; I spent an hour on the Sephora site, much of it soaking wet, trying to decipher them. Does Sweeney know what emulsify means, in a hair product context? Does anyone?
What had I learned about Sydney Sweeney so far? Perilously little. And that’s part of what’s unusual about her empire. In a piece for Eater, Erin A. Meyers, a professor at Oakland University who has studied celebrity image-making, pointed out that historically, with endorsements, brands got to take advantage of a celebrity’s popularity, but the other side of it was that celebrities got to shore up their own images. Jennifer Aniston, for example, used Smartwater and Aveeno as paintbrushes in the work of art that is Jennifer Aniston’s reputation as “down-to-earth” and “into nature.” “Overall, people still tend to choose things that seem fairly consistent with their brand,” Meyers told me when I spoke to her. Is there any such through line in Sweeney’s deals? Not one that the two of us could articulate. But increasingly, that’s not a problem. “You’re in it to get those deals and get those connections and get that money, and people kind of respect that as part of the hustle of stardom, as opposed to something that tarnishes your image,” Meyers said.
This would certainly help explain why Sweeney is also happy to be associated with a beverage most people have never heard of called Bai. The company sells a drink called WonderWater, and I have no idea what it is, even though there are three bottles of it sitting in my fridge. According to the Bai website, its drinks are “antioxidant-infused beverages with exotic flavors and no artificial sweeteners,” but you can see how that doesn’t really clear anything up. Sweeney is the “head of wonder” at Bai, and this year she and the company partnered to create a raspberry lemon-lime flavor. I didn’t get that one at the store, but I did pick up Brasilia Blueberry, Kula Watermelon, and Zambia Bing Cherry. I tried them, along with a couple of friends, and we weren’t sure what to make of them. Did they actually taste weird, or were we just thrown off by their dark colors? Was it something about their artificial sweeteners? Was the watermelon one actually kind of OK? And most importantly: Does Sydney Sweeney really drink these?
In the final throes of my Sweeney immersion, I went to a Verizon store. I wasn’t going to actually switch to a Samsung Galaxy flip phone, but I did want to check one out. As with many of the things Sweeney endorses, it seems fine, and I’m sure Samsung appreciates that she seems to actually use the phone—or at least puts effort into not being caught using an iPhone in public. I also ordered a hat from the “workwear collaboration” Sweeney did last year with Dickies and Ford. It seemed like more of a limited-edition affair than an ongoing thing, as with some of the other products Sweeney works with, but I felt it was important to have the hat, to let Sweeney commerce fully hit me over the head. Wearing the hat was trying. I now think of it, along with my HeyDudes, as part of my “Hope I don’t run into anyone I know while wearing this” repertoire.
As I wound down, I thought back to what Adamson told me about the changing landscape for stars and how maybe none of this matters. It might be hard to imagine Julia Roberts doing this sort of thing in her heyday, but if Sweeney is on her way to the modern equivalent of Roberts-level stardom—imagine the Erin Brockovich remake!—maybe this is just what that looks like right now. You could even argue that it’s a more honest version of what Reese Witherspoon and her commerce cohort do; at least Sweeney isn’t pretending she isn’t peddling a bunch of random stuff. In the Vanity Fair spread, Sweeney threw up her hands when asked questions about her image. “We’re going to have a conversation, we’ll talk for 30 minutes, it’s condensed, then people don’t understand the context behind the conversation, and it’s all clickbait. Unfortunately I don’t get to control my image—my image is in your guys’ hands,” she said, referring to the press.
From that vantage, a certain dose of YOLO makes sense. These endorsements no longer need to add up to any kind of coherent story, or anything at all. It’s not a coincidence that so many of them rolled in right after Sweeney had a big hit: That was her striking while the iron is hot. Maybe Sweeney is a new brand of capitalist actress with skills—like appreciating a good pair of boat shoes—that can’t be taught.
