How Celebrity Lookalike Contests Became a Cultural Phenomenon: Photos

Although we might think of America’s celebrity obsession as a modern cultural phenomenon, it has been around in various forms for more than a century. Today, we have access to some celebrities via social media. In the 1990s and early 2000s, paparazzi photos offered a glimpse into the lives of the rich and famous. And before that, there were celebrity lookalike contests.

These competitions gave everyday Americans a fleeting taste of Hollywood glamour. Crowds gathered at movie theaters and county fairs, either dressed as their favorite stars or eager to see the people who resembled them.

Unearthed in Greece in 1820, the Venus de Milo sculpture was considered the “embodiment of female beauty” in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The soft S-curve of her body, which was considered “wide on the bottom,” represented a new look for previously corseted women at the dawn of the 20th century.

This fascination with Venus de Milo’s shapely figure prompted people like physical educator Dudley Allen Sargent, director of the Hemenway Gymnasium at Harvard University, to embark on a quest to find a woman with the same perfect proportions. This involved taking 60 different measurements of college women’s bodies to see who came closest to those of Venus herself—in what was dubbed the “Modern Venus” contest.

Beginning at least as early as 1893, these competitions took place at universities, peaking in the 1910s and 1920s, and continued until at least the early 1940s. They were held across the United States, as well as in England, Australia and South Africa. 

These events focused exclusively on women’s bodies—it didn’t matter whether their face resembled that of the famous statue. Still, competing to see who had the greatest physical similarity to a well-known person (or in this case, statue) set the stage for the modern celebrity lookalike contest.

While Venus de Milo events were in full swing in the 1910s and 1920s, the modern celebrity lookalike contest was truly born when people competed to resemble actor Charlie Chaplin. The format for these competitions—in which contestants are judged based on their physical similarity to the famous figure—is still used today. “Like modern competitions, they were informal and grassroots,” says Marie Nicola, a pop culture historian at Past/Forward.

These contests began shortly after Chaplin’s first appearance as his character the “Little Tramp” in the 1914 film Kids Auto Race at Venice. Mimicking Chaplin’s iconic character, hopefuls came dressed in dark ill-fitting suits and bowler hats with drawn-on toothbrush mustaches, carrying canes.

“Cinema broadcasted Chaplin’s likeness to millions, producing recognition at a scale never before seen for a nonroyal or nonpolitical figure,” Nicola explains. “His face was uniquely copyable, his costume inexpensive and his walk distinct.”

This was also the moment when Hollywood amplified its celebrity culture, says Jack Bratich, professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, who specializes in popular culture. “During that time period it wasn’t just organic stars coming up, but there was a kind of machinery with tabloids and agencies trying to cultivate this idea of the celebrity through the emerging medium of film,” he explains. “That was a watershed moment, because it also starts telling the story of mediated celebrity, which is what the more recent contests are about.”

Although they continued through the 1920s, Chaplin lookalike contests peaked mid-World War I era. “World War I created a need for it, because his whole persona was the underdog surviving chaos with physical comedy,” Nicola says. “Organizing a contest around him was a way of communally celebrating something that felt good when almost everyone was desperate for escapism.”

There was a longstanding rumor that Chaplin once came in third place in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest, but it has since been disproven.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, celebrity lookalike contests served as a way for the average person to feel closer to Hollywood—regardless of where you lived. In 1934, there was a Shirley Temple lookalike contest in Sydney, Australia. The following year, roughly 950 girls participated in a similar contest during a food show in Cleveland, searching for a local girl who most closely resembled the darling of the Great Depression. The Temple competition was so popular that the organizers held three more during the show’s run: one for femme fatale film star Myrna Loy, another for the singer Alice Faye and the last for actor Katharine Hepburn. 

During World War II, there wasn’t the same appetite for celebrity lookalike contests, but these events picked up again in the 1950s and 1960s, when people competed to see who most closely resembled people like Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Doris Day, Roy Rogers and Frank Sinatra.

Celebrity lookalike contests have also been used as a way to garner publicity for movies. This began in the 1910s and 1920s, when theaters staged elaborate “prologues”—festivities that complemented the plots of the films they preceded. Theater lobbies were sometimes decorated like scenes from the movie, and contests and giveaways took placed on the stage. Among these contests were competitions to see who looked the most like movie stars that appeared in the film. 

These publicity stunts took place at least through the 1950s. “In 1956, when the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers came out, Allied Artists published an exhibitor manual full of ideas for local theaters to use,” says Adam Golub, a professor of American studies at California State University, Fullerton. One suggestion was to “have a newspaper conduct a search for the local girl who looks most like Dana Wynter, star of the film.” 

Celebrity lookalike contests enjoyed a wave of popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. Sometimes the competitions reflected current events. For example, Princess Diana and Prince Charles lookalike contests were popular in the 1980s, when the world was enamored with the royal couple. Similarly, a satirical Anita Bryant lookalike contest was held during the Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco in 1977, during her campaign to roll back anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTQ+ people.

Other contests of the 1970s and 1980s focused on recognizable public figures who left their mark on pop culture, including Elvis, Dolly Parton, D.B. Cooper, Dan Rather, Farrah Fawcett, Pee Wee Herman, Hummel figurines and Mr. Clean. 

There were also competitions paying tribute to historical figures like Abraham Lincoln. An annual—and ongoing—Ernest Hemingway lookalike contest started in 1981. For the past 45 years, fans have gathered in Key West, Florida, where the writer was a resident, to select one person who not only bears a physical resemblance to Hemingway but also embodies “his spirit and zest for life.”

Around the same time, magazines began sponsoring mail-in celebrity lookalike contests. Instead of an in-person event, the publications would ask readers to submit photos of themselves if they looked like a particular celebrity—like Boy George or Patti Smith—or, in some cases, any famous person.

Although there are a few examples from this period, celebrity lookalike contests weren’t as regularly held in the 1990s and the first two decades of the 21st century.

According to Golub, who is currently working on a book on doppelgängers, the current wave of celebrity lookalike contests is part of a broader cultural shift in attitude towards lookalikes. “For hundreds of years, our folklore and popular culture tried to warn us about doppelgängers: If you encounter your double, it’s often a sign of your impending death,” he says.

In October 2024, actor Timothée Chalamet showed up to his own lookalike contest in New York City. Soon after, similar contests popped up in parks across the United States and Europe, in search of dead ringers for Jeremy Allen White, Paul Mescal, Jack Schlossberg, Zendaya, Harry Styles and “Heated Rivalry” stars, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. There were also competitions to see who looked the most like John F. Kennedy Jr. held in New York City, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

“These contests can quickly be assembled on social media,” Bratich explains. “They go viral. It’s like the contests imitate other contests, so there’s another level of lookalikes.”

These recent competitions are indicative of how we view celebrities today, says Bratich: “We can’t just let celebrities and stars have a completely remote world, like, there’s always a little bit of bringing them down to earth through our embodiment, and that has skyrocketed in the 21st century.”