Register
Wishlist
Contact Us
OBEY, aka Frank Shepard Fairey, is an American street-artist known for making stickers and posters. His style includes a range of large posters and murals to small stickers. Most of these include the portrait of the Giant with a text that reads OBEY. His signature-like portrait of André the Giant appears in most of his work in a variety of ways.
André the Giant Has a Posse is a black and white, high-contrast style sticker by Fairey which has a portrait of the famous André Rene Roussimoff who was a French, professional wrestler with the ring name André the Giant.
The first version of the design was a grainy portrait of Roussimoff and had a text that reads “ANDRÉ THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7' 4", 520 lb", (2,24 m, 236 kg) which was André the Giant's billed height and weight)
André the Giant got this ring name due to his great size which was caused by gigantism, excess growth hormone. Some even called him “The Eighth Wonder of the World” due to his size.
Later on he worked on his sticker and changed the style and logic a little to create the OBEY Giant which is a much less grainer version that does not have the text. The OBEY Giant became more popular than the original sticker over time.
André the Giant: OBEY
Why did Shepard Fairey use André the Giant for OBEY? Why is it Fairey’s signature?
André the Giant Has a Posse by OBEY is a campaign made in 1989, when Fairey was still attending his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Fairey says that André the Giant was a spontaneous, happy accident when he was teaching his friend how to make stencils in 1989. They found an ad on a newspaper with André the Giant and Fairey suggested that picture for the stencil but his friend didn’t like it. So, Fairey made the stencil and a few stickers.
Fairey says, the text reads as ANDRÉ THE GIANT HAS A POSSE because “the group of guys I was hanging out with always called each other The Posse, so it said André the Giant Has a Posse, and it was sort of appropriated from hip-hop slang – Public Enemy, N.W.A and Ice-T were all using the word - as an in-joke between friends”.
According to Fairey, this work was “an experiment in phenomenology”. He made stickers with the portraits of André the Giant and then, Fairey distributed his stickers all around in the skater community and it resulted in these stickers to be all across the cities in the United States.
