After the kid’s stripper poles last year, this is no surprise.
Isn’t “Lola/Lolita” short for “Delores”? How many British people name their girl “Delores”? I don’t know why the Kinks chose that name, but it was probably chosen to be exotic.
ETA: Oh, addressed above.
In the translation I read, the character’s name was “Mulva” not “Dolores”
I gotta agree with this. It’s just beyond my imagination that none of the marketing people involved in “branding” the product would make the connection. I think it’s more likely that they expected the parents buying the beds not to get it, or not to complainif they did. Perhaps they were marketing to pedophile fathers and stepfathers. 
Nitpick. According to the book she was only Deloris on the dotted line.
Carry on.
One of my third graders has a sweatshirt that says “Lolita” on the front of it. It makes me shudder every time she wears it.
That is the creepiest thing ever.
NONE of them had heard of this book? :dubious:
Seriously, unless the child’s name is Lolita, someone needs to have a talk with her parent or guardian.
Actually, if the child’s name is Lolita, someone needs to have a different talk with her parents or guardian. It’s not a good idea to put a child’s name on their clothes, especially if it happens to be that of a notorious prepubescent sex object.
Hell, I know people who named their daughter “Lilith”. Let me rephrase that: I used to know some people who named their daughter “Lilith”.
My own WAG is that everyone thought it was a ‘literary’ name, without going into it any further than that.
“Nabakov? Famous writer dude, yeah? Wrote a book called Lolita. A teenaged girl is the heroine.”
“Excellent, we’ll use that.”
And they sell beds? The ones around here were mostly craft stuff and little odds and ends.
Maybe they were fans of Cheers?
I’m not even sure if my student’s parents can read Latin letters, at least when they’re written in cursive, like they are on the sweatshirt. I seriously doubt anyone but me has ever given it a second thought. My students regularly wear clothes - no doubt made in China by people with only the vaguest grasp of English - with all kind of weird shit written on them. One of my eighth graders recently asked me what “golddigger” means, since it was written in big letters on her new t-shirt. The class was amused when I explained the concept.
Still, it makes me cringe.
Ah, I hadn’t considered that. I guess it’s not as outrageous, then. I briefly had a Bulgarian pen pal who wrote to me in English, and thinking back on it, I believe she always wrote in block letters, even to sign her name.
Someone here posted a link to a blog by an American living in Turkey which had photos of clothing sold with all kinds of bizarre things on them.
Or the relatively recent remake of the movie? With the tarting up of little girls these days, I bet someone thought it would have an exotic connotation. Or someone who didn’t know English who made the name didn’t get the reference.
Since a popular sports drink in Japan is named Pocari Sweat, anything is possible.
There are whole swathes of people and cultures, in the Western world, who haven’t heard of many “famous” people, publications, movies, or incidents.
Really.
Meh, a case of PC run amok, in my opinion.
Just because the girl in that book was nicknamed Lolita doesnt mean that the name has to carry a stigma from here to eternity. Its a nick name like any other.
Lola, or more afectionately, Lolita is the nick name, usually for a woman or girl, called Dolores. Because an adolescent character in a novel wore (whored?) the same name now it`s taboo?
For what is worth in my country there`s a rather large chain of women clothing stores called Lolita
Melissa Maples, I keep up since I found it here.
But yeah, wow, amazes me it got that far. I haven’t read the book, or seen the movies, but I know what a Lolita is. Mainly startling is all.
Well, it’s a nickname whose connotations have been rendered pretty ‘official.’ From Merriam-Webster