What if Mahatma Gandhi was fond of tie-dye shirts or if Nelson Mandela wore his hair like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air?
HIPSTORY, a series by designer Amit Shimoni, reimagines famous world leaders, from Gandhi to John F Kennedy, as if they were modern-day hipsters. That means branded beanies and flannel shirts in the unlikeliest of places (on Che Guevara) and a vision of Vladimir Lenin in biker get-up that you’ll find hard to unsee.
“I often find myself imagining a world where some of these leaders are less interested in influencing lives, and more focused on their own persona,” Shimoni said in an email. “Imagine Gandhi obsessing about his looks, and not about releasing India from the British rule? Or Abraham Lincoln searching for a hip bar, instead of abolishing slavery?”
Shimoni insists his work is not aimed at criticising hipster culture and instead is simply intended at changing perspectives so we see things from a different light. But his very approach to the HIPSTORY series suggests something of a questioning stance.
“In our time and culture, the ‘big’ ideologies are lost ‒ we have grown tired, or perhaps too smart, to follow big systems of absolute ideas and beliefs,” he wrote, by way of explaining the series of illustrations. “But have we lost something in this process? With nothing to hold on to, we are becoming global beings ‒ focused more on our individual selves and less on society and ideology.”
This post first appeared on Scroll.in.
This article is a part of Quartz India. For more, follow this link.
Here is what world leaders would look like if they were hipsters
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