Hundreds of New Yorkers gathered outside Washington Square Park on Sunday for a contest with a single, oddly specific criterion: who most resembles Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Nine contestants took the informal stage in variations on the mayor's signature look — brown campaign-trail suits, patterned ties, dark blazers — while a crowd sized more like a small rally judged the results.
Moved Outside the Arch
The event, sponsored by the social app Sonder, was originally planned inside the park beneath its landmark arch, but organizers had to relocate just outside after police pointed out they lacked a permit for a gathering in the park itself. The crowd simply reassembled on the sidewalk and carried on.
The winner, Amadeo Fusca, sealed the contest by pairing a Mamdani-style suit with a New York Knicks jersey underneath and a haircut and facial hair styled to match the mayor's — a combination the crowd responded to instantly. Fusca took home a $100 prize.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist who took office in January after a campaign that generated an outsized following among younger and terminally-online New Yorkers, has become something of a recurring subject for the city's look-alike-contest circuit. A similar event was staged in Brooklyn in 2025 while he was still campaigning, and Sunday's contest followed the same template that has already produced lookalike contests for Timothée Chalamet and other minor celebrities at the same Greenwich Village landmark in recent years.
The genre — ordinary people competing to resemble a public figure, judged by a crowd rather than any panel of experts — has become a low-cost, high-turnout staple of New York street life since a Chalamet contest went viral there in 2024. Sunday's event, complete with nine costumed hopefuls circling the arch, suggests the format has outlasted any single celebrity trigger and is now simply part of how the park spends a warm Sunday afternoon.
