Why we’re ‘living in the golden age of the doppelganger’

It’s been a year of lookalikes – but the lure of the “second self” goes way back to the folklore of the Irish “fetch” and the Nordic “fylgja”, and to the writings of Edgar Allen Poe and Sigmund Freud.

In March of this year, someone with the feline eyes, blonde hair and high cheekbones of Kate Moss walked the catwalk at Paris fashion week. But it wasn’t Kate Moss. Online there was confusion. “Isn’t that just Kate Moss?” ran a typical comment. A disbelieving, “that is Kate Moss,” was another common refrain. For a savvy few, the gait gave it away as someone other than the famous British supermodel – it was in fact Denise Ohnona, a Moss lookalike from Lancashire.
High fashion seems to have sparked a trend. Later in the year, the floodgates opened to a wave of lookalike competitions. First came the moment for those who fancied themselves the spit of Timothée Chalamet to gather in New York’s Washington Square Park. Then Dubliners flocked to make the case that they looked like Paul Mescal. Next came a competition for Harry Styles lookalikes, then Dev Patel, followed by The Bear star Jeremy Allen White, Zayn Malik, Zendaya, and so on, with others slated to take place throughout December.
While this recent spate has felt very of-the-era and has been global in reach – each one spreading with breakneck-virality – the lookalike competition is not a modern innovation. Charlie Chaplin once came third in a contest to find his own likeness in the 1920s, according to his son, Charlie Chaplin Jr, who wrote in his book My Father, Charlie Chaplin: “Dad always thought this one of the funniest jokes imaginable.” Chaplin himself reportedly denied the veracity of the story. What is more testifiable is that Dolly Parton entered one of hers, recalling in her memoir how she “got the least applause but I was just dying laughing inside”.