The Temu pig T-shirt: the truth behind a tremendously disturbing top

Name: Temu’s “Stylish Pig Pattern Shirt”.

Age: It seemed to spring fully formed from a nightmare on to the internet last weekend, but the image was created to sell air fryers in 2017 .

Appearance: The polyester love-child of Hieronymus Bosch and Shein, seared on your retinas for ever.

That’s a bit dramatic. How bad can a T-shirt be? I can only assume you haven’t seen the Stylish Pig Pattern Shirt . I invite you – with extreme caution – to take a look.

Fine, but I bet it’s … Oh no. No no no. Now perhaps you can understand why X users have been traumatised by the relentless advertising of the pig shirt in recent days. “Millions of times a day,” one haunted user complained.

Once is too often. I have so many questions. Why are one set of the Stylish Pig’s teats like human breasts, and the others piggy? Why is it sweating in a sauna? Why does the ad say, “Style: sexy” ? I can’t answer any of that, but I can tell you a bit more about Temu if you like.

Fine, what is Temu? It’s a wildly successful Chinese shopping site selling things no one needs – many of them baffling and bizarre – unbelievably cheaply.

Just what our beleaguered planet needs: mountains of more tat. So the pig T-shirt isn’t a horrifying one-off? No. Acccording to retail expert Matt Piner, the awful, weird items are integral to Temu’s business model. “Some of their products are very much about catching the eye,” he told The Guardian last year. “If you’re scrolling down a page and there’s one of them in the advert, you stop.”

I hesitate to ask, but are there other horrors? The writer Lucy Sweet regularly highlights (lowlights?) eye-popping examples on her newsletter The Lucyverse. This week’s was a vibrating breast enhancer. Other gems include a prom dress for washing machines and a pink plastic machine that makes face masks with what Sweet describes as “The annoyed expression of a cab driver who’s just been asked to stop at a cash machine”. There’s another stylish T-shirt featuring an all-over print of what appear to be raw sausages .

Speaking of T-shirts, I keep going back to the Stylish Pig Pattern Shirt and I’m starting to think it has a certain je ne sais quoi … More than 100,000 happy shoppers got there before you and there aren’t many left, so you’ll have to hurry. That’s part of what has made Temu so successful: limited stock and availability gamify the shopping experience, getting users hooked.

Damn! I think it might be the refresh my winter wardrobe needs. Or maybe you could try the Anna Wintour-style bob wig some X users were offered instead?

Meh, that seems boringly normal. It’s a pet wig. Modelled by a French bulldog.

Do say: “How much is that piggy in the sauna?”

Don’t say: “£4.57, plus all your self-respect.”