On a chilly late November afternoon, Sebastien Landry donned a black turtleneck with matching leather gloves and sunglasses to complement his light-grey suit jacket. He was one of 11 curly-haired men who competed in a student-organized lookalike contest for American rapper and singer Jack Harlow.
After Landry, a second-year industrial design student, was crowned the best Harlow lookalike at the event in Carleton University’s residence quad on Nov. 28, 2024, he said winning the title felt like a new experience.
“I thought I’d probably lose, but it would still be something fun to do,” he said. “I had never done anything like this before.”
During the competition, participants were called up in pairs to stand before the audience, who cheered for their favourite Harlow lookalike out of the two. The face-offs continued until only Landry and the second-place participant remained.
“Even if I hadn’t won, it would still make my day,” Landry said. “I get a laugh out of it and people cheer for me.”
As the winner, Landry received an assortment of prizes, including ranch dressing (a flavour enjoyed by Harlow) in a New Balance shoe box — a brand that Harlow endorses.
Carleton’s Harlow event taps into a growing trend of lookalike contests, popularized by a lookalike competition for actor Timothée Chalamet in New York City on Oct. 27, 2024. That event garnered hundreds of thousands of likes online and was attended by Chalamet himself. In the following days, use of the search term “lookalike contest” exploded to reach its highest-ever point recorded by Google.
Since then, contests have been held worldwide for actors such as Jeremy Allen White and Paul Mescal, football players like Jason Kelce and internet personalities, including alleged UnitedHealthcare Inc. CEO shooter Luigi Mangione.
Youth culture and trends researcher Diane Pacom said lookalike contests have always been a way for ordinary people to obtain a few moments of fame.
“You don’t want to look like someone who has no power,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be a beautiful person. It has to be a powerful person.
“It’s a very empowering thing when you look like someone who has power.”
Upon being crowned the winner of Carleton’s Harlow contest with a plastic tiara, Landry said he was approached by audience members asking to take photos with him.
“Two minutes of fame,” he said. “I felt important for a bit.”
Artists, politicians and other public figures have a “surplus of power” compared to most ordinary people, Pacom said. She said sharing physical features with a recognizable individual can make some of that power “rub off” onto the ordinary person.
“Because you share with them the way you smile or the way you talk, [it] gives you a boost [of status],” Pacom said. “We become stronger because there is somebody that looks like us. It takes us out of anonymity.”
Geronimo Parodi-Matteo, a Carleton contract instructor, placed second in the competition. He said he decided to participate in the Harlow contest following the encouragement of his first-year chemistry students.
“It was fun, and yeah, you get the opportunity to have attention. You’re like, ‘Oh, I’ll take it. Why not? Let’s stroke the vanity,’” Parodi-Matteo said, laughing.
“The crowd really was a huge component to it,” he added. “Having people cheer, seeing my students there.”
Rudrakshi Chawla, a third-year business student and one of the contest organizers, said she was happy with the more than 200-person turnout.
Leading up to the contest, Chawla said she and other organizers distributed posters around campus with a photo of Harlow and a QR code leading to an Instagram account they created to advertise the event.
“Reactions went pretty well,” Chawla said of the turnout.
She added that content from the event, like a TikTok posted by an audience member, got reshared on popular Ottawa-based Instagram accounts like 613Trending.
“There was just so much love and appreciation, which was just amazing,” she said.
The Harlow lookalike contest even drew the attention of the official Carleton University Instagram account, which reposted videos taken at the contest, Parodi-Matteo said.
There is little difference between the attention lookalike contests draw from in-person events compared to social media, Pacom said, because the contests’ underlying idea remains the same.
“It underlines how people are fragile. They’ll do anything to get just five minutes of this stuff,” she said. “For the people who participated in the contest, it’s something that remains with them for the rest of their life.”
Nonetheless, Pacom said she thinks lookalike contests are “mostly entertainment.”
Parodi-Matteo said the Harlow contest offered the Carleton community an experience in which everybody, from contract instructors to students, could participate.
“It was definitely, I felt like, a bridging moment where everybody from all different parts of campus were there,” he said.
The event even drew connections to the larger, off-campus community. Parodi-Matteo said a fellow Harlow lookalike was a local musician who didn’t attend Carleton but heard about the contest from a friend.
“It was super cool that it brought people from outside the community,” Parodi-Matteo said. “So [lookalike contests] within the community bring people closer, but [it] also makes Carleton University accessible to a broader public.”
For Landry, the event was also a reminder of stories his parents would tell of their youth, about nights out dancing at disco bars and memories of people coming together to laugh. Moments like those, he said, are harder to come by now.
“Events like these, I think it brings back those moments that were lost from my parents’ childhood or my parents’ younger years,” he said. “I think they’re important in that sense. It’s bringing back something that we lost, something that we shouldn’t have lost.”
Featured image by Murray Oliver/the Charlatan.
