Lookalikes Used to Sell Proximity, Now They Generate Content

A few hundred people showed up at the University of Bristol recently to watch other people pretend to be Jacob Elordi.

The actual story is that this is not new — lookalike competitions were booming in 1980s Britain, with Princess Diana impersonators working seafront arcades and Frank Bruno doubles doing the cabaret circuit. Their return is what matters.

Those competitions required physical travel, geographic proximity, entrance fees. The assumption that proximity to a simulacrum might approximate some kind of value. The fan paid money to stand in the same room as someone who looked like someone else — that was the transaction.

The Jacob Elordi competition inverts this entirely. The participants are not selling proximity to the audience, but content to themselves. The competition exists because filming it for social media makes the experience valuable to the person attending. The lookalike now functions as a content generator for the fan's own platform, not as a substitute for access to the celebrity.

The fan no longer wants to be near the simulacrum.

The fan no longer wants to be near the simulacrum. The fan wants to be the simulacrum, filmed, captioned, reshared. The lookalike competition used to promise you could see closeness. Now it promises you can perform it for an audience of strangers who, on their own feeds, are performing the exact same story back.