All the President’s T-shirts

Popular clothing companies launch Obama-inspired tees. It has titles like ‘Yobama’ and ‘Barack and Roll’ which have become very popular.

With US President Barack Obama set to arrive in the city this weekend, the fanboy frenzy has hit the world of fashion too. Inkfruit, an online graphic T-shirt company, along with popular slogan T-shirt brand Tantra are racing to stores with their Obama-inspired merchandise.

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Inkfruit works on an online competition basis. A community of artists is invited to enter graphic designs that are then selected to adorn T-shirts. Kashyap Dalal, co-founder, says, “We are going to announce the winners of the Obama T-shirt this Saturday, even though it’s a bit late for his stay in the city. The tees will be available for online orders five days later.”

Dalal admits that the contest was organic, adding, “Some of our artists posted designs inspired by Obama on their own, so we decided to turn it into a competition. We are a basically a media company and whatever is in the news, we’d like to have a design on it.”

Tantra T-shirts are also revamping their original designs, created around the time that Obama’s presidential campaign began. “We launched our Obama designs for his election campaign, but added a few more designs into our Autumn/Winter 2009 collection. We had titles like ‘Yobama’ and ‘Barack and Roll’ which became very popular,” says Mitali Shukla, merchandiser. She affirms that the T-shirts are not meant to be political messages, adding, “even though the first line of tees did really well, this time the response was even better.”