Timothée Chalamet arrived when New York was looking for a doppelgänger for him – What is it about the craze in competitions?

We live a time of fads. The development of digital information technology, social media and algorithms have created a situation where various things spread terribly quickly and terribly widely on the internet without anyone really knowing why.

An example of this is this time the lookalike or double being competitions, which have been organized during the past autumn at least in New York, Dublin, London and San Francisco.

The event crossed the news threshold for the first time when an American actor Timothée Chalamet arrived unexpectedly himself to the doppelganger competition looking for people who look like him in New York on Sunday, October 27.

The actor did not participate in the competition, but posed for pictures with his fans at the event. There were a lot of them, newspaper The New York Times by estimated to be thousands.

After this, at least an actor has organized double-creature competitions Paul Mescalin looking in Dublin, singer Harry Stylesin looking in London as well as an actor Dev Patelin for those looking in San Francisco. Hundreds of people have also come to these, for example, The Guardian’s Harry Styles competition in London by about 500 people.

The winners of both the Chalamet and Styles competitions were awarded around 50 euros. The winner of the Mescal Award in Dublin was given photos that went viral from the event by A gift card worth 20 euros to the Lidl store or three pints of beer.

Foreign ones leaves by behind the trend is an American tube player Anthony Po. He organized the first Chalamet event in New York that went viral.

In a video published on his YouTube channel, Po says that he is marketing the competition by distributing a hundred posters about the event around the city. In addition, the information spread on the internet and social media. The police fined the organizer 500 dollars, or about 473 euros, for organizing an unauthorized costume contest.

Po has also organized various adventures in New York before. In April he gathered an audience of a hundred in Manhattan’s Union Square Park to watch as he ate a jar of Cheeseballs in a bright orange balaclava covering his face.

Twin creature races are not in themselves a new phenomenon. They have been an integral part of, for example, drag culture.

In 2012 Kantritähti Dolly Parton told In an interview with the ABC News channel, that he participated in the Dolly Parton look-alike competition of drag artists. Parton lost the competition, the participants of which, according to the article, did not even know that the star was one of the contestants.

What’s really new is that the case has become a global craze without any apparent reason.

The explanation is offered for example, the attention-seeking nature of young people or the uncertain world situation and the collective anxiety it causes, for which harmless public antics can act as a remedy.