It all started with a fifty-dollar prize in a New York park
Last Wednesday, a dozen or so young men gathered outside Boxpark Shoreditch doing their best Jude Bellingham impression, ahead of England’s World Cup semi-final against Argentina. This Sunday, Roof East in Stratford is running a Charli XCX lookalike contest with a £200 cash prize and a bag of ‘coke’ thrown in (a ziplock with a can of Coke, obviously!). Two contests, one week apart, and neither is the first of its kind in London this year.
The format traces back to 27 October 2024, when YouTuber Anthony Po put up fewer than fifty flyers around Lower Manhattan advertising a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in Washington Square Park. Several thousand people showed up and Chalamet himself walked into the crowd to take photos with his own doppelgangers – the NYPD eventually broke it up for lacking a permit. Twenty-one-year-old Miles Mitchell, dressed as Willy Wonka, took the fifty-dollar prize. A Paul Mescal version followed in Dublin, then Harry Styles in Soho Square, then Dev Patel in San Francisco, and Jeremy Allen White in Chicago, with Zendaya, Zayn Malik and Tom Holland close behind.
What is notable about where the format has landed in London in 2026 is how local it has become. The Chalamet-era contests were about celebrity, full stop, a chance to stand near the idea of fame for an afternoon. The Bellingham contest at Boxpark had a sharper hook, doubling as pre-match theatre hours before the semi-final, with a prize, a £1,966 Deliveroo voucher, nodding to England’s one and only World Cup win. Winner Marcus Legemah, a twenty-four-year-old UCL student, said he gets told he looks like Bellingham mostly by drunk strangers in pubs, which is as good a description of the entire genre as any.
The Charli XCX version at Roof East works on similar logic, timed to land the same week as Music, Fashion, Film is released. A £200 cash prize is a decent incentive by lookalike contest standards and the venue’s own joke about the prize says more about what these events have become than any trend analysis could.
Communications academics who covered the original wave, including Oakland University’s Erin Meyers, have pointed to something simpler than celebrity worship: a low-stakes excuse to stand in a park with strangers and do something a bit stupid together. That is part of it, but not the whole explanation.
A lookalike contest costs almost nothing to put on: a phone, a flyer, a public square with no permit fee if nobody asks first, and a costume attendees probably already own. For local press and social accounts, it is close to guaranteed footage, a line of people stepping forward one by one to be judged, which is why the same shot keeps doing the numbers however many times it is repeated. Nobody in that chain is taking on real cost or risk, which is unusual for anything that reliably goes viral now.
Some of it is about what these contests let people avoid admitting. The Chalamet-era version grew directly out of stan culture, the kind of fandom that queues for hours or pays real money to be near a celebrity. A lookalike contest borrows that same energy while performing total irony about it. Standing in Soho Square claiming to look like Harry Styles is a different act to buying a ticket to see him, because nobody has to say they actually care, which suits an audience that grew up mocking stan culture as often as taking part in it.
The small, jokey prizes are the mechanism rather than a quirk. Serious money would tip the event into an audition and the crowd would start taking it seriously. And what the contests react to has shifted too: Chalamet and Styles were a public vote on who London or New York found attractive, while Bellingham is built around a football result and Charli XCX around an album cycle. The format has stopped being about who is hot and become a general-purpose response to whatever is dominating the culture that week, the same way a meme template gets reused for whatever’s in the news. That usually means a trend is closer to its end than its start.
Roof East’s contest runs this Sunday, 26 July.
