Three Wolf Moon is a

T-shirt A T-shirt (also spelled tee shirt), or tee, is a style of fabric shirt named after the T shape of its body and sleeves. Traditionally, it has short sleeves and a round neckline, known as a ''crew neck'', which lacks a collar. T-shirts are general ...

featuring three wolves howling at the

Moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System and the largest and most massive relative to its parent planet, with a diameter about one-quarter that of Earth (comparable to the width of ...

. The numerous satirical reviews for this on

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...

have become an

Internet phenomenon An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme ( ), is an idea, behavior, style, or image that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet ...

. The T-shirt was designed by artist Antonia Neshev.

Origin

The Three Wolf Moon T-shirt, created by The Mountain Corporation, gained popularity after attracting

sarcastic Sarcasm is the caustic use of words, often in a humorous way, to mock someone or something. Sarcasm may employ ambivalence, although it is not necessarily ironic. Most noticeable in spoken word, sarcasm is mainly distinguished by the inflection ...

reviews on

attributing great power to it, such as making the wearer irresistible to women, striking fear into other males, and having magical healing abilities. Brian Govern, a law student at

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

, was searching for a school book on Amazon and was led to the Three Wolf Moon T-shirt by an Amazon recommendation which had been targeted at students purchasing college semester books. He decided to write a review of the shirt on a whim as he did not actually own the shirt. His faux-serious review as "Bee-Dot-Govern" in November 2008 concluded: Since this original review was posted, more than 2,300 similar reviews have been posted. Some reviewers have uploaded images showing famous people wearing the shirt. The shirt attracted further interest when it became popular on networking sites such as

Digg Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launch ...

and

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

and was then lauded in conventional media as an Internet phenomenon. German scholar Melvin Haack considers it to be a notable example of a

redneck joke A redneck joke is a joke about rednecks—working-class, rural, southern white Americans. For example, These jokes can be a form of classism, depending on the teller. Jeff Foxworthy is a comedian that specializes in telling redneck jokes. For e ...

. The reviews have been included in studies of such online sarcasm. Such sarcasm tends to confound analysis of customer reviews and so the texts have been analysed to determine which elements might identify sarcasm. One common example found in

n-gram In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an ''n''-gram (sometimes also called Q-gram) is a contiguous sequence of ''n'' items from a given sample of text or speech. The items can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or b ...

analysis was "

alpha male In biology, a dominance hierarchy (formerly and colloquially called a pecking order) is a type of social hierarchy that arises when members of animal social groups interact, creating a ranking system. A dominant higher-ranking individual is som ...

Sales

The T-shirt is manufactured by The Mountain Corporation, a wholesale clothing company in

Keene, New Hampshire Keene is a city in, and the County seat, seat of Cheshire County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 23,047 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, down from 23,409 at the 2010 United States Census, 2010 census. Keene is ho ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. Their

art director Art director is the title for a variety of similar job functions in theater, advertising, marketing, publishing, fashion, film industry, film and television, the Internet, and video games. It is the charge of a sole art director to supervise and ...

, Michael McGloin, said that they were making many more shirts in response to the great demand which had made it the top-selling item in Amazon's clothing store. Due to the success of the shirt, the

New Hampshire New Hampshire is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec t ...

Division of Economic Development made it their "official New Hampshire T-shirt of economic development" and awarded it as a

prize A prize is an award to be given to a person or a group of people (such as sporting teams and organizations) to recognize and reward their actions and achievements.

for

innovation Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed entity ...

Parodies and attributions

A similar shirt featuring

Keyboard Cat Keyboard Cat is a video-based internet meme. Its original form was a video made in 1984 by Charlie Schmidt of his cat Fatso seemingly playing a musical keyboard (though manipulated by Schmidt off-camera) to a cheery tune. While Schmidt had uplo ...

s instead of wolves has been produced at the T-shirt design site

Threadless Threadless (stylized as threadless) is an online community of artists and an e-commerce website based in Chicago, Illinois, founded in 2000 by Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart. Threadless designs are created by and chosen by an online community. E ...

. In July 2009, this was the most highly rated design there.

Capcom is a Japanese video game developer and video game publisher, publisher. It has created a number of List of best-selling video game franchises, multi-million-selling game franchises, with its most commercially successful being ''Resident Evil' ...

prepared a limited run through

iam8bit iam8bit, Inc. is a media production company, creative policy institute, and art exhibition based in Los Angeles, California. Development iam8bit was originally developed by video game and tech journalist Jon M. Gibson, in the summer of 2005 ...

of a "Three Wolf God Sun" shirt for the 2010

San Diego Comic-Con International San Diego Comic-Con International is a comic book convention and nonprofit multi-genre entertainment event held annually in San Diego, California since 1970. The name, as given on its website, is Comic-Con International: San Diego; but it is co ...

, featuring images of the wolf gods Shiranui, Amaterasu and Chibiterasu from their video games ''

Ōkami is an action-adventure video game developed by Clover Studio and published by Capcom. It was released for PlayStation 2 in 2006 in Japan and North America, and in 2007 in Europe and Australia. After the closure of Clover Studio a few months a ...

'' and ''

Ōkamiden ''Ōkamiden'', known in Japan as is an action-adventure game, action-adventure video game published by Capcom for the Nintendo DS handheld game console. It is a spiritual successor, rather than a sequel, to ''Ōkami'', a game released originally ...

''. ''

Minecraft ''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being ...

'' parodied the design in its merchandise, replacing the wolves with creepers, an enemy featured in the game.

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...

created a parody of the "Three Wolf Moon" shirt using images of their mascot

Jack the Bulldog Jack the Bulldog is the official mascot of the Georgetown University Hoyas athletic teams. The school has employed at least eight live Bulldogs as mascots, and counts seven named Jack since 1962, when the name first came into use, including three ...

as a promotion for students attending a 2015

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appr ...

game.

References

{{reflist, 1=30em, refs= {{cite news, url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/nyregion/25towns.html, title=Think a T-Shirt Can't Change Your Life? A Skeptic Thinks Again, author=Peter Applebome, newspaper=

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

, date=May 24, 2009 {{citation, url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8061031.stm, title=Joke review boosts T-shirt sales, author=Daniel Emery, publisher=BBC, date=21 May 2009 {{citation , url=https://books.google.com/books?id=T-JvPdEcm0oC&pg=RA1-PA273 , title=Business Intelligence , author=Rajiv Sabherwal, Irma Becerra Fernandez , publisher=John Wiley and Sons , year=2009 , isbn=978-0-470-46170-9 {{cite web, url=https://www.amazon.com/review/R2XKMDXZHQ26YX , title=B. Govern "Bee-Dot-Govern"'s review of The Mountain Youth Three Wolf Moon Short S , publisher=Amazon.com , date= , access-date=2013-02-04 {{cite web , url=https://www.wmur.com/article/state-hopes-to-harness-power-of-three-wolf-shirts/5161333 , title=State Hopes To Harness Power Of 'Three Wolf' Shirts , work= WMUR , date=27 Jan 2010 {{cite web, url=https://www.amazon.com/The-Mountain-Three-Short-Sleeve/product-reviews/B002HJ377A/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_summary/181-5771422-2287905 , title=Customer Reviews: The Mountain Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee , publisher=Amazon.com , date= , access-date=2013-02-04 {{citation , url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QZZIp4DYN1gC&pg=PA195 , title=Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones , author=Joseph Jaffe , publisher=John Wiley and Sons , year=2010 , isbn=978-0-470-48785-3 {{citation , url=http://www.unplaqued.de/files/2009/09/rednecks-melvin-haack-ma.pdf , title=Redneck Jokes as a Subcultural Phenomenon , date=2009-08-20 , publisher=Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig , author=Melvin Haack {{citation , url=http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W11/W11-17.pdf#page=130 , title=Mining Subjective Knowledge from Customer Reviews: A Specific Case of Irony Detection , author=Antonio Reyes, Paolo Rosso , year=2011 , access-date=2011-12-05 , archive-date=2012-07-11 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120711035153/http://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W11/W11-17.pdf#page=130 , url-status=dead {{Cite web, url=https://www.themountain.com/, title=The Mountain Artwear Tie-Dyed Animal T-Shirts & Apparel, website=www.themountain.com, access-date=2017-05-04 {{citation, url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2009-05-20-0905190421-story.html , title=Comedians of the Amazon , author=Steve Johnson, date=May 20, 2009, publisher=Chicago Tribune {{citation, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180612141624/http://theridiculant.metro.co.uk/2009/07/three-kayboard-cat-moon-and-the-internet-did-rejoice.html, archive-date=2018-06-12, url=http://theridiculant.metro.co.uk/2009/07/three-kayboard-cat-moon-and-the-internet-did-rejoice.html, publisher=Metro, author=Tom Phillips, date=23 July 2009, title=Three Keyboard Cat Moon: and the internet did rejoice {{cite web , url = http://www.mtv.com/news/2461497/awesome-three-wolf-moon-shirt-gets-okami-fied/ , title = Awesome Three Wolf Moon Shirt Gets 'Okami'-fied , work =

MTV MTV (Originally an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable channel that launched on August 1, 1981. Based in New York City, it serves as the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group, part of Paramount Media Networks, a di ...

, date = 2010-07-15 , access-date = 2010-07-15 , first = Brian , last = Warmouth {{cite web , url = http://www.capcom-unity.com/vabor/blog/2010/07/14/sdcc_update:_triple_function_design , title = SDCC Update: Triple Function Design , publisher = Capcom , date = 2010-07-14 , access-date = 2010-07-14 {{Cite news, url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2015/01/09/georgetown-fans-howl-happily-over-iconic-jack-the-bulldog-t-shirt/, title=Georgetown fans howl (happily) over iconic Jack the Bulldog T-shirt, last=Steinberg, first=Dan, date=2015-01-09, newspaper=Washington Post, access-date=2018-06-07, language=en-US, issn=0190-8286

External links

Artist's website
T-shirts Internet memes Canines in popular culture Wolves Amazon (company) Moon in culture