You can Google around for about 3 seconds and find far filthier photos and footage of porn star Sasha Grey than the new nude American Apparel ad everybody is talking about this week, and, for that matter, risque American Apparel ads are nothing new, either, so this isn’t about that. In fact, this isn’t even the first time Sasha Grey and American Apparel have crossed paths and made sweet Internet buzz together.

Still, the three sexy photos of Sasha Grey wearing nothing but a pair of the company’s yellow stripe thigh-high socks that cycle through the American Apparel ad over on The Reverse Cowgirl blog (not really all that safe for work, but not terribly obscene, either) are an interesting next step in the second act of a porn star who seems poised for mainstream success both despite and because of her hardcore porn background.

There have been porn crossovers before Sasha Grey, some of them finding huge mainstream succeess, but the self-proclaimed “existentialist porn star” is somehow different, in ways that (yes, please) threaten to bring down all kinds of barriers and taboos. Hell, having seen some of what else she’s capable of in her other work I feel silly even having to label these images NSFW and crop them for the Examiner.com audience but, then again, where do you draw the line?

Perhaps Sasha Grey can help move this imaginary line in the sand which all businesses must eventually dance around to determine how much sex really does sell versus how far societal buttons can be pushed in some new way? This isn’t just some sexy model wearing some socks, after all: Sasha Grey is one of the most foul-mouthed females in hardcore porn, and she’s somehow managed to take ownership of her own exploitation and twist it around into something like a feminist statement.

It’s no small feat, and with increasingly mainstream movie roles — Oscar-winning director Steven Soderberg recently filmed her in the lead role of his new film, The Girlfriend Experience — and her PG-13 turn in the music video for The Roots’ Birthday Girl (video below, just because) she is perhaps proving that at least some of the stigma formerly associated with a career in porn is just no longer there.

This latest ad from the controversy-courting American Apparel is also fundamentally a study in Internet buzz. Although she’s also an award winning video queen, Sasha Grey, like all porn stars in this day and age, is chiefly an Internet phenomenon, and her fame rests largely on the Internet’s facilitation of finding whatever particular kink one might desire… in this case stripey 70s-style socks, which, it turns out, a lot people think are pretty sexy.

For folks looking for all manner of fetishistic depravity, Sasha Grey is a mere couple of keystrokes away, but as near as I can tell, this ad is only running in one place, over on Susannah Breslin’s Reverse Cowgirl blog (a great source of very thoughtful writing about sex, btw). That’s more than enough, and it’s a well-spent advertising dollar: The ad is being picked up and spread in articles like this one all over the blogosphere (I first found it on Nerve), essentially going viral the second it hit the Internet, by design.

In other words: Mission accomplished.

And, one final note on that mission: Those stripe thigh-high American Apparel socks are totally hot, are they not?

Here’s that Roots video I mentioned. It’s just about the only existing video of Sasha Grey you’ll be able to enjoy in the company of people you work with, so enjoy: