Obey - a brief history...

We're very excited here at Fat Buddha with the recent arrival of one of the hottest streetwear brands available...Obey Clothing! The tees, which will be available online only, feature classic Obey logos/icons and others with his more recent intricate design work...prepare to be suitably impressed!

For those who have been asleep for the past decade or so and are not aware of the Obey brand or Shephard Fairey (the brains behind it) here's a quick run down of what it's all about...

Shephard Fairey is an artist, designer, deejay, activist and skateboarder. While studying at Rhode Island School of Design in 1989, Shephard was explaining to a friend how to produce a stencil, and to show how easy it was, he opened a newspaper and happened across an image of the wrestler Andre the Giant - Shephard thought it was cool, his friend thought it was stupid, he proceeded to turn it into a small vinyl sticker, which he reproduced many times over. As a skateboarder, him and his friends covered a lot of ground, stickering wherever they went, baffling everybody with the 'Andre has a Posse' slogan. It was one of the most successful viral marketing campaigns to this day.

After being threatened with lawsuits from the company who owned the trademark 'Andre the Giant', he developed the character into the icon he became famous for. To finish it off, he added the 'OBEY' to the bottom of it after seeing the cult film 'They Live', which plays on the notion of subliminal messages in advertising.

Over the following years, Shephard travelled the world, sticking, wheat pasting and postering as he went, with and estimated 1 million hits, that's some going!

His style started being noticed by the right people and he was soon setting up his own studio, Studio Number One, to produce graphic design work for some major clients.

All this high profile work enabled him to undertake bigger projects and travel more, getting the Obey logo out there even more.

He hit the mainstream, when he made a poster to help a little known senator called Barrack Obama, become the first black president of the United States. This poster would later cause him a lot of problems, with the photographer saying the image was used without permission and Shephard standing up for 'fair usage' for artists (it's such a grey area, the argument could go on forever).

Amongst the art and street art communities, there is a love him or hate him attitude towards Shephard/Obey. Personally, I like his work and I'm pretty sure that he doesn't really care what people think. All we know is that the graphics he produces for his prints (which sell out in minutes), graphics for mainstream brands, posters to promote awareness of charities/organizations he believes in and of course his clothing are amongst the best out there at the moment. 

We're sure the tees won't be on the site for long, so keep an eye out for them going live on Fat Buddha's online shop to avoid disappointment. We've even got a few obey stickers which will find there way into the first few orders we get. If you aren't already following us on twitter, get going, as this is where all the latest news drops first.