Twerking Had Merch Before It Had a Legacy

By the time anyone prints a joke on a shirt, the joke is already dead. That’s the iron law of pop-culture merchandise, and the "School of Twerk" tee—spotted on Grace Helbig in fall 2013—obeyed it perfectly. Twerking peaked at the VMAs, generated its thinkpieces, and was already calcifying into nostalgia before the ink dried. The shirt had exactly the right amount of deadpan self-awareness for a bit in its death spiral, which probably made it worth owning more, not less.