What Angela Merkel Looks Like with a Nose Ring

The premise sounds like a punchline: Israeli illustrator Amit Shimoni takes world leaders—living, dead, iconic—and redraws them as contemporary hipsters. Nose rings, tattoos, beanies pulled low. The series is called Hipstory, which is exactly the kind of pun that either makes you groan immediately or warm to the whole project on the spot.

The faces he picks are the ones that have long since calcified into symbols: Merkel, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela. Reducing them to the aesthetic vocabulary of subculture does something genuinely strange to them. Guevara already spent forty years on T-shirts, but Shimoni’s version feels like it’s commenting on exactly that—turning the icon of the icon into something almost affectionate. Mandela in a beanie is disarming in ways that feel earned rather than cheap.

Shimoni studied at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and sells the work as poster prints, phone cases, pillows, postcards. The merchandising instinct is part of the point, really—these figures have been merchandise for decades. He’s just updating the format.

The obvious next candidate is Obama, but the one I actually want to see is Kim Jong-un. Or, if Amit happens to be reading this in 2034, our new alien ant overlords. I may have said too much.