Celeb look-alikes, campus crushes, capitalism, and copying community

The wave of celebrity look-alike competitions, started by the now-iconic Timothée Chalamet event, reminds me of voting for Campus Crush senior year of high school. I canvassed for the boy at school who looked most like Harry Styles. Unrelated to my years-long fixation with the boybander, I thought Campus Crush should reflect culture. Seriously no one else cared about this line of reasoning. A different boy won. But now, culture is finally catching up to me.

The Timothée Chalamet, Paul Mescal, Harry Styles, Dev Patel, and Jeremy Allen-White look-alike competitions —  Zayn Malik, Jack Schlossberg, Clairo, and Billie Eilish look-alike competitions are forthcoming — come at a time when America is obsessed with the so-called Gender War. But these competitions are a rare moment of public gender unity. Crowds of mostly women celebrate men for something outside of their control — providing no threat to patriarchy — and have fun doing it. 

As a Timmy lover and nosey person, I attended the inaugural look-alike competition in Washington Square Park . Attendance was surprisingly equal in gender. Lots of men with no resemblance to Timmy showed up. Maybe he uniquely appeals to men? That’s not true because at least one told me he isn’t a good actor because “he acts the same in every movie.” Was it his ability to tap into straight male culture? Chalamet made liking rap a cornerstone of his personality, likely relatable to a lot of other white men. 

Already a viral moment before the event happened, it defied traditional understandings of celebrity meme culture. Media coverage of the inaugural look-alike competition was interesting as both a lapsed Timmy expert and attendee. The Guardian’s analysis of the event personally missed the mark: “You will have heard of this lookalike competition, because it’s the lookalike competition that was attended by Timothée Chalamet himself, turning an occasion that threatened to become vain and self-indulgent into something that was inarguably vain and self-indulgent.” Me and Timmy aficionados everywhere found it charming that he showed up to a place where thousands of his fans gathered, especially given the fervor of fandom lately. 

Much of the coverage looked at how the competition became a dating event. Writers focused on Sommer Mae Campbell, a 23-year-old woman who carried around a sign reading, “Are you single? Do you like girls? Come take my card.” She passed out business cards and secured a date with two Timmys, including 22-year-old Spencer Lorenzo, me and actual Timmy’s favorite. Lorenzo got his hair done in Chalamet’s signature face framing curls, brought his dad, and is so so short. Other girls in attendance brought signs like, “Looking for a man.” Apparently there was also a speed-dating round of the competition that I missed.

At the Dev Patel look-alike competition in San Francisco, single contestants were similarly paraded around to exchange numbers and social media with attendees. 

For our piece on celebrity-voiced audio erotica, Chase and I talked to Amanda Gesselman, a researcher at the Kinsey Institute, about celebrity crushes. She used to research sexually-inexperienced adults and noticed many had formed intense bonds with an unreachable crush. "At the time, I was calling this a kind of Prince Charming effect (but I think it's more celebrity based than that), which is that many of them were fixated on an idol — a type of person, or a star, or some of them had a character in a book that they were kind of fixated on — and were comparing real life, potential partners to that person. That was creating a barrier for them," she said. 

The look-alike competitions are the ultimate manifestation of the Prince Charming effect, another final frontier of obsessive fan culture. At these events, women aim to date men who resemble their celebrity crush who, aside from a cursory outline, is just someone they made up in their head. 

“If he didn’t exist, I would just be, like, another guy,” Lorenzo told The Cut about Chalamet. “I suppose I have some sort of leverage looking like this attractive celebrity.” 

But as insidious as this phenomena might look from that angle, just as some of my deepest, most transformative friendships were predicated on obsessing over the same famous man, the Timothée Chalamet look-alike competition was an effective, organic, community-building event — one X user said, “timothee chalamet lookalike contest is giving me the most joy i’ve felt in a hot minute.” I echoed the sentiment in my journal: “Participating in an in-person moment of goofiness and hysteria is so life-affirming!” 

It was so effective at galvanizing the masses, that it was a threat to the police state resulting in the arrest of a Timmy and brands took notice. 

As Haley Nahman wrote, “The whole spectacle reminds me of high school. Not because it’s juvenile, but because high school forces a bunch of people together every day who will do anything to stave off boredom together, and there’s something magical in that particular recipe.” In high school you had endless things to bond over with your classmates — you didn’t need to create a shared world, it already existed — to the point where there was no need for Harry Styles, talking about the normal boy in math class did the trick. In our increasingly atomized society that lacks third spaces, maybe one of the few things left to connect with complete strangers about is a celebrity.

Still, celebrity-centric community building is imperfect — as soon as it’s seen as effective, it’s commodified. The second notable look-alike competition was corrupted from its inception. Unknown to international spectators, Lidl, the German discount supermarket chain, organized the Paul Mescal look-alike competition in Dublin. The company said, “the idea was to spotlight the chain’s reputation as a place for affordable versions of popular items.” 

And isn’t that what the look-alike competitions are? An array of affordable Timothée Chalamets for people desperately craving intimacy and community. 

Let me know what you want to see from Altar Boys!

Celebrity worship touches all aspects of our lives, so please tell me what topics you’d like me to cover. This newsletter is partially an experiment in writing for my brilliant friends instead of the Google Search lowest common denominator. Speaking of, thank you to Chase for edits on this!

Catch up on some of my relevant writing.

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Celebrity-voiced erotica is the new frontier in online celebrity-thirst

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What do we lose when influencers replace journalists on the red carpet?