Dylan Hartigan co-founded the OIBOY clothing brand with his mate George Langham.
“Which pub do you fancy then?” Dylan Hartigan asks me as I clamber into the passenger seat of his motor outside Carshalton train station. My wafer-thin research had showed me that OIBOY, like many bright ideas, began in the pub, arising from the increasingly – to coin a phrase, “f*** it, let’s just do it” mentality – that steady intoxication so often induces. My reply therefore was simple: “take me to where it all began.”
A three-point-turn, bit of banter with the bar staff, and a gorgeous first sip of our pints later, we were on to discussing how Dylan and his mate George Langham (who couldn’t join us because he was working) started their tongue-in-cheek clothing line that playfully tinkers with the logos of some of Britain’s most beloved (and beleaguered) brands.
The story is as simple as you like, beginning in 2014. “There was no big investment, it was all very homegrown. It started with the ‘Brokelads’ T-shirt,’ Dylan tells me in a bish-bash-boshed rhythm.
“I went to George, who was my next-door neighbour when I was younger and is a graphic designer, and said ‘I’ve got this idea, it’s literally swapping ‘lad’ and ‘broke’ – ‘Brokelads’ – can you do it?’ ‘Yeh, I can.’ ‘Sweet.’ Then we just f***ing pinged off each other.”
“There was no big investment, it was all very homegrown.”
Following some time at University in Bristol – “a good playground for novelty T-shirts, with a good amount of people to test stuff on” – Dylan discovered that they might well be onto something. “I was surrounded by people – it was a good time.”
“I realised people like supporting novelty T-shirts. A lot of people have got a lot of things to prove at Uni. So I got on the phone to George and said ‘let’s just print this, let’s print the ‘Brokelads’ and let’s print the ‘Yoots’, let’s just do it’.”
Their gung ho approach is commendable, and obviously worthy of me getting the first round in, but mimicking, among others, a well-known betting company, Britain’s foremost pharmacy chain and the long-running French fashion retailer popular with Brits on the design of their T-shirts, was always likely to meet a few snags in the long and legal road of copyrights.
“We’ve had bare issues – a lot, a lot, a lot. To be honest with you, at the beginning we were just making it regardless of who would say what. It was quite a stupid way of going into it but at the same time we thought if we didn’t make the T-shirts, we wouldn’t know, so let’s just do it and see what happens’.
OIBOY gained support after being shared on Instagram by designer Christopher Shannon.
“Yesterday we got a letter through the post from Nationwide – that’s my f***ing bank bruv. That’s f***ed. The Nationwide one didn’t even do well,” he half-jokingly adds, plucking out a composite T-shirt of Favorite Chicken and Nationwide from his sports bag, “so to get in trouble for it is just a bit s***ty.”
Dylan holds out the Tee, and whilst you can understand that the world’s largest building society would detest the sight of itself getting greasy with chicken and chips, you can appreciate the joke.
But the duo at OIBOY started to receive more positive news, from their bank as well as their growing fanbase, when designer Christopher Shannon reposted one of their designs on Instagram. “That did us favours big time. It probably would have been a different journey if it weren’t for that. I’d say that was a catalyst, 100%. If it wasn’t for that there probably would be no GQ or Selfridges.”
And indeed there wouldn’t have been a showing from OIBOY on an even more prestigious fashion platform: London Fashion Week. “We were brought into the designer’s showroom in January last year, 2018. We were next to Ben Sherman, Sergio Tacchini, these kinds-of people, which is mental because all our stuff is Gildan T-shirts with either screen prints or digital prints.”
As well as being shown at London Fashion Week, OIBOY clothing has been stocked at high-end department store Selfridges.
“People gravitated toward us ‘cause they just thought it was honest. To be even more honest, it didn’t really make much sense. Fashion Week is about fashion; OIBOY ain’t about fashion, we’re about putting the terminology of what we grew up with on a T-shirt.”
That terminology is unmistakably British. Dylan and, I get the impression of absent George, are unmistakably lad. “I think OIBOY is just playing on day-to-day things man. I love that. As a designer myself I love just walking down the street and seeing these small examples of Britishness.”
“People talking about the weather – it’s all just f***ing boring, but there’s something nice about it also. There’s a beauty in just the day-to-day, I think. So launching that and giving it its own platform to thrive is nice, innit. ‘Cause otherwise they’d just get forgotten about and brushed under the carpet. It’s just nice to document that.”
OIBOY has been built upon tinkering with the logos of Britain’s most beloved and beleaguered brands.
The focus of OIBOY is now aimed precisely at that. Four months prior to our pint, Dylan and George established OIBOY Studio – a platform from which the pair can work as graphic designers from, “more like a creative agency”.
“I think we’ve parked the bus now – this is it,” Dylan says, with a hearty thump on his bag of merchandise, “you’ve got Poundland, Lacoste, sports bags. My way of thinking for the brand now is completely different. For me this is the trophy cabinet – so have them there and leave them there.”
“I think the more we do, it’s just gonna water it down. I know a load of brands that are still doing bootlegging and I see it and I’m thinking ‘you’re running out of ideas, lads’. We didn’t jump on the bandwagon – for me that’s the most important thing.”
OIBOY Studio has been established, from which Dylan and George can operate “more like a creative agency”.
“The new direction for OIBOY will be more making collections about these day-to-day narratives. So at the moment we’re doing a tan-line collection. It’s all OIBOY, there’s no bootlegs in it, it’s all OIBOY own-brand clothes, but the narrative is something that follows the ethos of what we always were before. It’s basically growing-up.”
“It’s more about progressively building a brand and getting a wider audience to understand it and them to start buying into it. It’s a big arts project man,” he says, getting to the nub of his treasured project, his mind now looser as a result of his drink. “That’s really what it is. It’s documenting and observing day-to-day life in Britain. That is it, that is it.”
With our pints having reached their foamy conclusions, it well and truly was it, our time to say farewell.
