Obey

Fairey and campaign co-author Ryan Lesser, along with Blaize Blouin, Alfred Hawkins, Mike Mongo Nicholl, and Michael Meinhart created paper and vinyl stickers and posters with an image of the wrestler André the Giant and the text "ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7' 4", 520lb", as an in-joke directed at hip hop and skater subculture, and then began clandestinely (and somewhat fanatically) propagating and posting them in Providence, Rhode Island and the Eastern United States. By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of paper and then vinyl stickers were photocopied and hand-silkscreened and put in visible places throughout the world, primarily in culturally influential urban settings in the United States, such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco, but also in places which travellers often visited such as Paris, Greece, London, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, Istanbul and the Caribbean Islands.