We Are All Characters Now
By Lauren CochraneLately, you can barely move on the internet for news of a lookalike competition. Once the preserve of the village fete or the more obscure corners of Comi Con, there was one this weekend for Dev Patel in San Francisco, described as “wholesome” by the writer, Taylor Lorentz. It followed similar outings recently for Harry Styles in London and Paul Mescal in Dublin – funny mainly due to the sheer amount of short shorts and mullets (Mescal trademarks) in one place. But the one that started all of this off? Timothee Chalamet’s in New York, an event so hyped that Chalamet himself turned up.
If this could be seen as just the most recent example of a ‘silly’ trend spreading across the world – all competitions took place within a fortnight – the craze for lookalikes are also perhaps the peak of a wider online trend, spilling over into real life. The internet is often seen as a place where narcissism runs riot, but there’s a counter to that: it’s also where we’re having the most fun pretending to be someone else, where playing a character, or indeed cosplaying a movie star on his day off, is a kind of self-expression.
You can see this in the invented characters that dominate online life. This runs across fashion trends – the Office Siren (sexy workwear) or the Weird Aunt (cardigans, probably glasses). Or dating – which features the Hot Rodent Boyfriend, a surprisingly attractive man despite (or because of?) their slightly ratty look, and the Pick Me Girl, a woman who supposedly seeks male attention through performative stunts.
Characterisation on the internet has obviously been put in the spotlight recently thanks to Halloween or, as what now might be known as “Hallowmeme”. More than ever before, there’s attention on this holiday, with costumes this year even more focused on ifkyk internet references, from everyone’s favourite hippo Moo Deng to Raygun, the Australian breakdancer whose ‘moves’ went viral at the Olympics in the summer. There was also the ‘I hate gay Halloween’ meme which gently mocked how ‘the more obscure the cultural reference, the better’ became so rife: a tweet reading “Gay Halloween is so dumb what do you mean you’ve gone as just stop oil,” is a good example of this critique.
Depending on your point of view, this type of dress-up is either a clever post-post-modern comment on online life – especially with the gay Halloween trend – or, as Kate Lindsay wrote in The Atlantic, a way that “the chronically online have stolen Halloween”.
Lindsay may be bracing herself for more – as dress-up like this escapes October 31st. Cosplay as Chalamet or Mescal is a continuation of this meme-focused trend – their look has become the centre of viral images. See Paul Mescal in his GAA shorts during lockdown or Harry Styles apparently spitting on Chris Pine on the Don’t Worry Darling press tour in 2022. Chalamet, who himself has played characters including Bob Dylan and Willy Wonka, is a treasure trove of references, and that’s not to mention the unlikely romance with Kylie Jenner, which is ripe for speculation. Crucially, these men have all, at one time or another, been that ultimate online character – the internet’s boyfriend.
If ‘internet boyfriend’ as a term is familiar, dating back to crushes on Ryan Gosling a decade ago, then it’s worth unpacking it for a second – because it has the exact irony and absurdity that make up the way the very online frame identity. No one is really seeking to look like a hippo (although, as makeup tutorials make clear, those cheeks are very enviable) or make Willy Wonka style work for the office. But with thousands of images bombarding us every day, actually absorbing culture deeply is pie in the sky. Instead, we’re trying on these increasingly fleeting identities in the hopes of finding our own. After all, who’s to say that, in a sea of Paul Mescals, you might not actually see yourself?
Lauren Cochrane is Senior Fashion Writer of The Guardian and contributes to publications including The Face, ELLE, Service95, Konfekt and Mr Porter. Based in London, she writes about everything from catwalk shows to footballers’ style and the linguistics of Love Island. She is author of The Ten: The Stories Behind the Fashion Classics. You can read more of Lauren’s writing on Something Curated here.
Header image: The Timothee Chalamet contest in New York, courtesy of AP.