‘We have zero tolerance for nastiness’: Harry Styles lookalikes lift the London gloom | Harry Styles

It looked a lot like the other lookalike contests that have captured the imagination in the last few days, but the London event was not quite the same as it was in New York and Dublin.

For a start, Harry Styles did not gatecrash his own lookalike contest in Soho Square in the West End, as Timothée Chalamet had two weeks earlier in New York.

And, unlike the New York police, the Met did not arrest any unruly lookalikes, nor did they fine the organisers and try to move them along. Londoners were much better behaved.

“We have zero tolerance for nastiness,” the organiser, Katrina Mirpuri, told the crowd as the event began. “My mum is here and she’ll tell you off if you start being nasty.”

But in most other respects, the London Harry Styles lookalike contest was a dead ringer for the others. A crowd of about 500 people, mostly young women, cheered the Harrys and filmed them on their phones as the contestants – 13 of them – stood on a park bench in a corner of the square.

The winner of the £50 best lookalike prize was Oscar Journeaux, a 22-year-old singer and guitar player in west London rock band Parlay. The prize for worst Harry – a four-pack of beer – went to a man holding a kilo of sugar and one small watermelon, although he won over the crowd with his rendition of Styles’ second biggest hit, Watermelon Sugar.

Mirpuri, a journalist, had dreamed up the lookalike contest four days ago after reading about Chalamet’s New York event and another in Dublin for Paul Mescal, a lead in the lockdown TV hit Normal People and now the star of Gladiator II.

“New York, Dublin – we one-up you,” Muripuri said through her megaphone. “Harry Styles is a London legend.”

“I felt like London was missing out,” she told the Observer. “Harry is an iconic guy and he’s a Londoner now, he’s lived here long enough.”

For anyone only vaguely aware of the Harry Styles phenomenon, the singer was plucked from the X-Factor reject pile in 2010 by Simon Cowell to become part of One Direction. He went on to become the most recognisable member of the biggest British boyband of the last decade.

Styles went solo in 2016, produced more No 1 albums and sell-out world tours, appeared in movies from Dunkirk to Eternals and established himself as a fashion icon.

Petabytes of the internet are devoted to galleries of Styles’s outfits: jumpsuits – harlequin, candy stripe, tinsel and more – a baby doll dress, a Gucci 70s wallpaper suit, shirts with 10-in collar flaps, pussybow tops and flared jackets, and a notorious fluffy white onesie.

This was the inspiration for Directioners in the crowd, as well as Mirpuri, who wore a pair of yellow Gucci flares and a blue feather boa in homage to the star.

Journeaux sealed his victory by whipping off his leather jacket and posing for his new fans in a white vest top, sending the soprano-pitched cheers up a notch.

The attention made him feel “a bit overwhelmed,” he said. The guitarist is a Styles fan. “I suppose he led this new type of masculinity in the mainstream,” Journeaux said, of the touch of vulnerability in Styles’s public persona.

The singer’s androgyny had encouraged Mirpuri’s team to believe that more women might take part than men, and three entered the contest, but the biggest and highest-pitched cheer went to Andy Bradley, nicknamed Daddy Harry. The 36-year-old turned out to be a semi-professional Harry. “I’ve done some lookalike work in the past,” he said, “for Pizza Express”.

It had been hard to tell whether anyone would make an appearance beforehand, although the police showed up just in case there was Harrygeddon. The only lookalikes seen in Soho Square were a woman who resembled Angela Merkel from a distance, and a flock of near-identical pigeons. They roosted and plotted in the trees above the event, but the contestants escaped unscathed. London has been wrapped in an anticyclonic gloom of low, grey clouds for several days but the contest was a bright spot beneath the low clouds.

“It’s winter, it’s cold, it’s a bit gloomy, it’s not really been the best week of news,” Mirpuri said. “I think this will cheer everyone up.”