Sydney Sweeney launched a lingerie line called Syrn (pronounced “siren,” because of course it is), and she would very much like you to know that she built it for women. “I wanted to build a lingerie brand that feels like it understands women instead of talking at them,” she told Elle. It is a noble ambition. It is also the most optimistic sentence uttered in the celebrity fashion industrial complex in quite some time.
The line launched with two of its four planned collections, Seductress and Romantic, with Playful and Comfy presumably arriving whenever the brand figured out that women occasionally leave the bedroom. Scaachi Koul reviewed the pieces for Slate and found them perfectly adequate: they fit, they’re reasonably priced at $89 a piece, and they’re about as revolutionary as a cheese sandwich. Fine. Fine is fine. But fine is not the conversation.
The conversation is this: Sydney Sweeney has spent the better part of six years becoming one of the most recognisable women in Hollywood almost entirely on the strength of male attention. Her bathwater soap sold out in hours. Her American Eagle ad broke the internet. Donald Trump praised her publicly, which is a five-alarm warning in its own right. She has a net favourability rating of +22 according to YouGov, higher, deliciously, than the sitting President of the United States.
