Woody Allen sued Dov Charney's clothing company American Apparel for $10 million for using without permission an image of Allen dressed as a rabbi on billboards in New York and Los Angeles. Clearly, movie director Allen does not want to be associated with chronic inappropriate masturbator and accused sex harasser (and fellow Jew) Charney. Because then, you know, people might think Allen had weird sexual issues. (Click thumb for larger image of the billboard.) [Bloomberg]

Stereotypical hipster brand American Apparel has always walked the fine line between sexiness and porn with its ads (like the one pictured). Or gone over the line, depending on your perspective. But now the anonymous prankster that earlier posted a fake finger-in-the-butt AA billboard has struck again, helping the company along its inevitable path to becoming a full-blown pornography producer. Why beat around the bush? Heh. After the jump, the two new naked AA ad spoofs [via Copyranter] that have appeared in downtown NYC. Possibly NSFW, if you consider simple line drawings to fit in that category.

Now, this is the kind of thing we like to see: in Radar Online, an American Apparel model defends the sticky-but-fun truth about modeling for pervy (yet pleasingly macho) founder Dov Charney. "We were more than five hours late to this shoot at Dov's loft in Manhattan because I could not stop puking up the entire bottle of wine I downed the night before... although when I glimpse my protruding ribs on the back of L.A. Weekly weeks later, I'm secretly thankful for having nothing left in my stomach that day." Seriously, she continues, he's actually a standup guy, a real mensch (despite the pending sexual harassment lawsuits.)

Finally, the gay American Apparel ad we've been waiting for. We see that they went for the easy pun, pointing out that they sell both "Bottoms... and tops!" (Thanks to the reader who scanned his copy of Butt magazine!) Click for the NSFW fun.

A while back, we asked, "at what point will American Apparel's billboards show some equal opportunity and start featuring fully-splayed half-naked men as well as women?" Hallelujah, that day has almost arrived! Dutch magazine Butt ("a pocket-size, quarterly magazine for and about homosexuals") has saved us via an AA model search for boys. No photos yet, but rest assured, we're on this. [Butt Magazine]

Is all the "OMG, vote" earnestness getting to anyone else? The lame-leggings purveyor began their voting plea with an extremely ill-advised quote: "Four decades ago, the chairman of General Motors proclaimed, 'What's good for GM is good for America.' Today we're saying, "What's good for American Apparel is good for America.'" (Actually, what ended up being "good for GM" in the following years was laying off tens of thousands of autoworkers from my hometown, but that's neither here nor there!) Given AA's previous foray into politics, who do they endorse?

American Apparel placed an ad in the New York Times on Friday, getting all political on us: "At American Apparel, we agreed with the President's call for immigration reform, so why has nothing been done for the last three years? ....It's time to give a voice to the voiceless. Businesses are afraid to speak to the media about immigration, frightened of reprisals by government agencies.... At what point are we going to recognize that the status quo amounts to an apartheid system? At what point will America stop living in a state of denial?" Wild! At what point will your billboards show some equal opportunity and start featuring fully-splayed half-naked men as well as women?

France, home of both Marquis de Sade and Hélène Cixous, is now home to American Apparel ads that would make even the most debauched American libertine blush. (Or not. Whatever.) The girl in the picture, says the ad, is a young actress they met on the streets of Paris. Oh yeah? Was she walking on the streets? Is she a street walker? In either case, what is beyond the jump is Not Safe For Work.

Despite a surfeit of youth-oriented clothes for young people being youthful from nearly all the Presidential candidate's official stores, Mike Huckabee is apparently the only candidate to offer his face on an American Apparel shirt. Because all the rest of them have crazy ideas about "unions" or something. Or is Huckabee just that hip? If you're wearing the AA Huckabee tank top and you put on a "Wellesley Women For Hillary" button would the universe collapse in on itself? [NYT]

If the American Apparel folks really wanted to feature "a Lindsay Lohan type" in one of their trademarked, porny hipster-underthings ads so badly, they should have just waited for her to get back from Cirque Lodge. With the underwhelming critical response to her last project and all those insurability issues awaiting her upon her return home to Los Angeles, they almost certainly could've obtained the services of the genuine article for a surprisingly reasonable quote.

As summer overdoses and dies, so do our excursions to Fire Island. And so this is our season finale, as it were, of Rod Townsend's adventures among the gays, recording the conversations of their native environment. See ya, gays!

Copyranter thoughtfully assembles a collection of softcore American Apparel for your weekend masturbatory needs. Of course, seeing as you're already on the Internet, you can probably find something better, but it's still nice to have them all in one place. [Copyranter]

Remember when we speculated that the next secret celebrity hotspot would be the upstairs of Barnes and Nobles on Thursday evenings? We weren't too far off. As the Observer observes, the new "it" spot is that bench in front of American Apparel at Houston and Orchard. "The Bench," as the bench is called, was founded by DJ Big Black Matt Goias, a sneaker "impresario" named Ari Forman and Moby's best friend, a guy named Fancy.

From the mailbag:

Finally, someone explains why the Lower East Side American Apparel shows a DVD of topless Jewesses in its window. "'Provocative ads are a tried-and-true strategy for fashion companies,' said Ron Berger, chairman of Advertising Week 2007. 'I'm not saying showing nipple is mainstream, but you have to be blind not to see the Calvin Klein ads where the guy is wearing a pair of briefs and his penis looks like it is 14 inches long.'" [AMNY]

I suddenly have an inexplicable urge to shop at American Apparel. [Copyranter]

If Lindsay Lohan's recent Rock-Bottom Memorial Day Weekend Spectacular could be crystallized into one image, it would likely be a photograph taken of the actress the night after her drug-related arrest: It featured the starlet being carted off unconscious from Teddy's, eyes closed, mouth agape, and in possession of a pale, violet-tinged complexion that suggested the earliest stages of rigor mortis had begun to set in. In other words, it looked like your average American Apparel ad, and the fact that she just happened to be wearing one of the hipster sportswear company's hoodies at the time made it a near no-brainer for inclusion in their recent marketing efforts. From the NY Times:

Eavesdropping on the gays is the surest way to find out what products and people are hot and what are not. This summer, Rod Townsend will record the gays in and around their natural environment of Fire Island and report back. All dialogue 100% verbatim.

That's right, kids, if you study hard enough, you can end up working retail for American Apparel.

Dov "There's A Bulge in My Hand" Charney of American Apparel seems to be eschewing his early aesthetic of working-pink girls for that of rebbes, or at least Woody Allen dressed as a rebbe. At first we thought this ad, on the corner of Houston and Allen, was a rabbi and we did not speak out. Then we lost a $50 bet that it was Woody Allen dressed as a rabbi. We thought perhaps the ad was an erectile-geographical pun (in that order) and we did not speak out. Then Curbed alerted us to its appearance in LA and still we did not speak out. So now, we're making up for our silence the only way we know how: with horrifying Photoshop.