HAVE YOU ever bought an item of clothing that promised you instant irresistibility to the opposite sex, infinite knowledge or psychedelic vision quests?
Such are some of the qualities being ascribed to an innocuous T-shirt that has become a phenomenon due to the actions of internet pranksters.
The shirt – entitled “Three Wolf Moon” – is a hideously kitsch aberration, with the fashion sense of a binliner. Featuring an airbrushed portrait of the creatures howling at a glistening lunar globe, it is the type of garment favoured by grizzly Tennessee mountain men who fly Confederate flags from the back of their pick-up trucks.
It lay ignored for years on Amazon.com, until a sarcastic link from US website CollegeHumor.com saw it suddenly gain hundreds of five-star ratings.
The reviews forum on the site blossomed into an often-hilarious exercise in one-upmanship, with nearly 500 contributors trying to outdo each other in weaving epic testimonies about the shirt’s mystical properties.
One poster claimed his dead grandfather came back to life after being buried in the shirt. “It was clear a miracle had occurred,” he wrote. “Plus, the shipping was reasonable.”
Another claimed his brother Spud has disappeared since donning Three Wolf Moon. “I believe that the shirt has actualised his spiritual abilities and taken him to an alternate plane. Either that or supermodels took him,” he states.
“When I first saw it, it was like the heavens parted and all I could hear was angels singing,” mused another poster.
Bizarrely, the caper translated into massive sales, with thousands of buyers helping the shirt briefly surge to the top of Amazon.com’s list of bestselling clothing, leaving Nike trainers and Levi jeans foundering in its wake like lame coyotes chasing the wolf pack.
With many of the reviews poking fun at America’s “white trash” underclass, the firm that manufactures the shirt wasn’t initially over the moon at the attention.
“Not everyone from our neck of the woods lives in a trailer or cruises Walmart to hook up,” a spokesman for The Mountain company, based in New Hampshire, said.
However, with sales up by over 2,300 per cent, they soon saw the funny side and decided to print up 400,000 more shirts.
The spoof is being seen as a wake-up call to multinational corporations struggling to maintain sales in a depressed global economy.
“This resonates with a geeky, hip crowd that is very web-savvy,” CollegeHumor.com co-founder Josh Abramson explained. “When something resonates with that circle, crazy things can happen.”
This episode proves that the world’s biggest clothing companies, despite multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns and global brand recognition, can be trumped by a few hundred mischievous jokers with keyboards and a sense of irony. They must be howling mad.
