Illustrator Makes Hipsters Out Of World Leaders
In this age when Facebook posts have become veritable sources to be quoted from and our knowledge of politics has been reduced to posts on Quora and Yahoo Answers, it is perhaps necessary for our political leaders to reinvent themselves. Because we won’t indulge ourselves with anything that ancient.
Israeli Illustrator Amit Shimoni’s project “Hipstory” that includes a series of posters reimagining prominent world leaders as hipsters must bring them out of the black and white obscurity of history.
So Mahatma Gandhi gets a cool makeover complete with gold-rimmed aviators and goldchain.
Winston Churchill, while retaining his iconic “bulldog” face, looks no-nonsense workman-like in a striped v-neck tugging his body and smoke between his ears.
JFK is more Johnny Depp with a nose ring.
Abraham Lincoln shows a fetish for gold. He is the kind of suave that the don from Sicily would be proud of.
Lenin is your badass gangsta and then follow Mandela, Ben-Gurion, Mao and Thatcher.
However, the most intriguing, as Esquire points out, is Che Guevara. Shimoni here has taken a political leader who has been reduced to being only a hipster in our contemporary world — adorning the T-shirts and walls of those for whom Cuba is either a cigar brand or a disgusting soft drink — and made him hippier(?). But the Adidas logo inscribed so proudly on his cap also seems to be a comment on our capitalist society.
You can get in touch with or simply view Shimoni’s works on Facebook/ Nuvango/ Instagram.