Sydney Sweeney may have just wandered into Taylor Swift’s most famous feud from her home base in California, and she did it with a pair of underwear.
The 28-year-old actress unveiled the newest drop from her SYRN lingerie brand on Instagram Wednesday, sharing a Story of a pair printed with the phrase “but daddy I love him.” She captioned it breezily: “panty packs with some of my lil sayings hehehe.” To most followers, it was a throwaway product post. To Taylor Swift’s fanbase, it was a declaration of war.
The reason: “But Daddy I Love Him” is the title of a track from Swift’s 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department, a song she later folded into her Eras Tour setlist. Swifties clocked the phrase instantly, and the fact that Sweeney called it one of her own “lil sayings” only sharpened the reaction.
What turns a coincidence into a conspiracy theory, in fans’ eyes, is who Sweeney is dating. Since 2025, she has been linked to music mogul Scooter Braun, the executive at the center of Swift’s long-running masters battle. Braun acquired Swift’s first six albums in 2019 when he bought her former label, Big Machine Records, a move Swift publicly called the work of an “incessant, manipulative bully.”
That fight defined an era of Swift’s career. In response to the sale, she rerecorded her early catalog under the “Taylor’s Version” banner, urging fans to stream the new masters she owned instead of the originals. The saga reached its emotional finale in May 2025, when Swift announced she had bought back all of her music. “All of the music I’ve ever made now belongs to me,” she wrote at the time, calling it her “greatest dream come true.“
So when Braun’s girlfriend stamps a Swift song title on lingerie and claims it as her own, the fanbase was never going to let it slide.
Swifties Cried Foul, Then Got a Reality Check
The initial reaction was pure suspicion. “Sydney Sweeney, girlfriend to Scooter Braun, has a Taylor Swift lyric on a pair of panties that her brand is selling: ‘but daddy I love him.’ And then she says it is one of her little sayings? Messy girl,” one X user wrote in a post that spread fast across the fandom.
But the pile-on ran into a problem: the phrase is not Taylor’s. Cooler heads pointed out that “but daddy I love him” is a decades-old expression, most famously a line from Disney’s 1989 film The Little Mermaid, spoken by Ariel about Prince Eric long before Swift was born. “I like Taylor, but that was a quote before Taylor was even born. I promise you not everything is related to her,” one fan wrote. Another put it flatly: “This is such wishful thinking. I’ve had clothing that says ‘but daddy I love him’ for decades. Not everything starts because Taylor Swift jumps on board.“
Even skeptics granted the coincidence looked loaded given Sweeney’s link to Braun, but the consensus tilted toward eye-rolls at the outrage rather than at Sweeney. As one commenter summed up: “She has absolutely nothing to do with Taylor but wtf is this culture garbage on my TL.“
For her part, Sweeney has said nothing to suggest the phrase was aimed at anyone. Whether it was a wink, a coincidence, or a marketing team that never saw it coming, only Sweeney knows.
The internet, as usual, could not even agree on what it was mad about.
