Being a lookalike today comes with social capital – but what can it teach us about how we view, present and then re-present ourselves?
I’ve come face-to-face with a doppelgänger at two points in my life. First, when I was a child, on a family trip in Australia. I spent the week with my red-haired double. We’d catch frogs in our hands and count our matching freckles in the hotel pool. Fellow tourists would take our photos, asking if we were twins. Then, in 2019, I met my other (other) self, Juule, while covering Moscow Fashion Week. Again, we bonded instantly. Again, people asked if we were twins or siblings. We’ve kept in touch since then – meeting up with each other in London, Berlin, Tbilisi and New York. Every time we’re together, we take a photo. Sometimes, we post it on Instagram. We’ve learned that, time and time again, people on social media are drawn to seeing doubles.
The past year has been big for lookalikes. There have been Timothée Chalamet lookalike contests, followed by ones for Harry Styles, Dev Patel, Jeremy Allen White and Zendaya (the list goes on). We’ve seen doubles on the screen with Mickey 17, in kissing Spring/Summer 25 campaigns, Fendi campaigns, and AI “digital twin” models brought to life by H&M. There’s also been ongoing (and rather reductive) conversations around which model or influencer is the “human dupe” of the other. Take Gabbriette and Amelia Grey, for example. Grey has been accused of styling herself (or even having work done) to look like Gabbriette. Instead of intentionally differentiating themselves, the pair have embraced the discourse for a recent lookalike campaign for Marc Jacobs. In it, they dress the same, pose the same, speak at the same time and carry “dual bags” from the brand. So, what can the social capital of doppelgängers today teach us about how we view, present and then re-present ourselves?
Doppelgängers have always commanded attention. References to doubles go back to ancient Irish folklore, where a “fetch” serves as a supernatural double of a living person, usually as an omen of impending death. There are doubles mentioned in the work of Sigmund Freud and Edgar Allen Poe, as well more recently in Naomi Klein’s book, Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. There’s also the fact that identical twins have always commanded a certain amount of attention in person. It makes sense: seeing two similar-looking people used to be somewhat of a rarity. However, thanks to the internet, we’re now exposed to more faces than ever before (some of whom are bound to look alike), at the exact time that plastic surgery has become more readily available and beauty trends have become extremely homogenised. We used to encounter doubles every so often; now, we’re seeing them everywhere we turn.
Adam Golub, a professor of American studies at Cal State Fullerton, is currently working on a book-length study of the cultural history of doppelgängers. He says our obsession with doppelgängers has “ebbed and flowed” throughout history. Golub has tracked three major surges of doppelgängers interest: after the invention of photography in the late 1800s, when the science of cloning began to take shape in the 1960s, and right now, in the midst of new AI technology. There are some obvious parallels between these peaks. “Doppelgängers speak to changing ideas about consciousness, identity and new understandings of our inner fragmentation,” he says. “But the dopplegänger also connects to whenever there’s a new technology of duplication and a sense of crisis in national identity – a division in the body politic.”
Before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, he supposedly saw a pale version of himself – his doppelgänger. At the time, Golub says America was a nation that was fragmenting. Then, once film was invented, we started to see these fragments on the screen from the 1950s to 1970s, with Jekyll and Hyde movies like The Twilight Zone, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives. “There’s a certain Jekyll and Hyde quality to American culture right now,” says Golub. As such, there’s also (again) an eruption in doppelgänger visuals: Get Out, The Substance and Severance. “Jekyll and Hyde embodied this sense that we are transitioning from one era to the other, and it’s happening quickly,” says Golub. “Today, some of these stories speak to a sense of dislocation from old ways of communicating, working, dating, pursuing leisure and relating to one another; giving way to something that also feels new and fast.”
In her 2023 bestseller, Klein says, “No one makes themselves; we all make and unmake one another.” This speaks to how being a doppelgänger can translate to social capital today. In a world where looking like someone can land you a major campaign, or creating a digital twin means you can model in two places at one time, being a doppelgänger has become a cheat code for generating buzz in an attention economy. “2025 is the year of the doppelgänger. Specifically the doppelgänger deployed as a means of gaining capital (social, financial, cultural),” 20-year-old Ivy wrote in a now-viral Tweet. “To represent a world in which we must gather the most lucrative aspects of our selves and market them as a commodity to employers, social media etc.”
Every now and then, I wonder where my childhood doppelgänger ended up – or if she still looks like me. Her image helps me imagine another version of myself: one who chose a different path and stayed in New Zealand or Australia. And, from the viewpoint of psychology, Golub says doppelgängers perfectly symbolise the narcissism of our modern age. “It’s a kind of obsession with the self where one is not enough,” he says. “I need to see and become obsessed with another version of me.” This feeling can now be emulated with a smartphone and your favourite social media platform – but, in the age of digital doppelgängers, even those who aren’t pursuing the perception of being a known double find themselves pressed under the weight of constant social media comparisons.
Casey Hope, a 29-year-old in Arizona, joined TikTok to post content about being a single mum. “My goal when I started was to reach other women, to tell them they can do anything they set their mind to and inspire them to dream big,” she says. Then, the Billie Eilish comparisons started rolling into her comments. She figured it would be harmless to post a video about her resembling Eilish – and that initial video went viral. “That video has started to be life-changing for me,” she says. “I’ve started getting PR, and last week, I got my first offer for a paid collab.” Only her other content, where she posts as herself, doesn’t have the same social media impact.
A few months ago, Hope heard another creator say something along the lines of “TikTok tells you what your niche is and how you will go viral”. “TikTok is telling me that my niche is Billie Eilish, which is so cringy,” she says. On the platform, Hope is stuck between a rock and a hard place: She can ignore the Eilish comparisons and get lower engagement, or she can lean into it and get comments like “Billie from Amazon”, which she has started receiving recently. “The Billie videos are unserious,” she says. “I’ve never experienced comments like this before, but I’m not upset because this is the risk you take when you try to share your life online.”
For much of the history of doppelgängers, they’ve come with a warning: beware of your doppelgänger; they are here to replace you. Today, being a non-celebrity who’s dubbed a doppelgänger (or, worse, a “human dupe”) opens you up to both virality and scrutiny. It’s a one-way ticket to performing within the limited, digital box in people’s minds. But the old fears of being replaced by our doppelgänger don’t seem to apply anymore (maybe because we’re already seeing it play out). So what does this increasing ambivalence to doppelgängers mean? Are we going to keep seeking out our doubles – even finding comfort in them – as we enter this new AI-powered era? “We ourselves are more divided than we thought,” says Golub, finally. “Now we can’t eliminate all of the doppelgängers, we’re gonna have to learn to live with them.”