OBEY T-Shirts

About

Summing Up OBEY T-Shirts Every OBEY graphic tee carries a piece of Shepard Fairey's history with it. It starts in 1989, when the Rhode Island School of Design student created the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" sticker, an image he later reworked in 1996 into the bolder, more Orwellian OBEY Giant icon that gave the brand its name and its command-to-disobey logic (borrowed from John Carpenter's film They Live). By 2001 that visual language had become a clothing line, and by 2008 Fairey's Obama "HOPE" poster had carried the same stencil style onto a Time magazine cover and into the U.S. National Portrait Gallery. Murals for Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, for Paris and for London followed, alongside gallery shows like Beyond The Streets at London's Saatchi Gallery. OBEY T-Shirts are the most direct route into that archive: screen printed reproductions of stencils, posters and protest graphics that Fairey has been developing on walls and in galleries for more than three decades, resized for chest and back rather than a building. How Do OBEY T-Shirts Stack Up Heavyweight box tees: cut from 100% cotton jersey at around 8oz, giving a heavier, boxier drape that can carry large-format graphics without curling or showing through, distinct from OBEY's lighter Classic tees. Classic tees: a lighter-weight, true-to-size cotton jersey with a cleaner, less boxy silhouette, better suited to layering under a shirt or jacket than the heavyweight styles. Chest-and-back print placement: Fairey's artwork is screen printed at poster scale across the chest and back panels, the same scale his street pieces and gallery installations were designed to be read at. GOTS-certified organic cotton: as part of OBEY's Fair Trade commitments, a growing share of the tee range is woven from GOTS-certified organic cotton, so the graphics come with a cleaner supply chain behind them. The Urban Industry Take on OBEY T-Shirts We saw Fairey's tee graphics next to the source material firsthand at the Beyond Th