The very same company that used Woody Allen’s image without his permission in order to create revenue-generating controversy has denied a young writer permission to use similar tactics to promote his book.

During Q&A at the reading I hosted with Tao Lin last night (Boston Phoenix podcast pending), he revealed that American Apparel declined his publisher’s offer to carry copies of his new novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel. No matter what you might think of Tao Lin the person, Tao Lin the Internet persona or Tao Lin the writer, American Apparel’s decision is terribly strange.

Although there’s a slim chance that American Apparel’s virtual bookshelf has too many VICE anthologies to fit anything else in, I’ll go out on a limb and conclude that the company’s decision reveals the limits of edgy marketing. This is a clothing line that has made sex-y/-ist images a vital part of its brand. It hasn’t shown the slightest hesitation in offending any number of women by regularly portraying them as smacked-out hipster sex kittens dying to get fucked (by Terry Richardson’s camera no less, eew!).

But, when a book comes along that uses the American Apparel brand name alongside the word “shoplifting” (and incorporates the American Apparel logo’s bare-bones aesthetic into its cover art), party’s over. No matter that the character who enacts the titular shoplifting goes to jail (or, you know, that the book itself isn’t actually about shoplifting, but generational entropy), the mere hint of an association with something that would detract from the store’s profits outweighs the potential benefit of being a store so culturally relevant that it’s now featured in the title of a book from a respectable publisher.

One of the rallying cries of my generation’s cultural critics is that marketing stops at nothing. This is especially true when it comes to brands marketed to young people trying to be alternative.  Dead Kurt Cobain wearing Doc Martens in Heaven? Whatever. An ass, some hair and a pair of legs spread-eagle on a bathroom wall? Who cares. A book that makes reference to something that has the potential to eat away at profits (but only at the hands of  the very, very stupid)? No way!

Now let’s all do coke and masturbate on reporters!