MANILA, Philippines—In late August, two guys named Andrew stepped off a plane in Miami International Airport. They were dressed in identical khaki suits. Beneath matching pith helmets they wore matching glasses.The two men—who call themselves Andrew Andrew, and have been living together, dressing identically and refusing to distinguish between each other for nine years years—were on their way to the MTV Video Music Awards. In practice, wrangling two seats in the American Airlines Arena (capacity: 20,000) to witness MTV’s flagship exercise in self-congratulatory celebrity spectacle was not particularly extraordinary. Many people assumed that these faux twins had to be somebodies, and despite their not being on any exclusive guest lists, the velvet ropes parted. The Andrews didn’t complain. “We were at one party with the Olsen Twins and Paris Hilton, which was amazing,” the more talkative Andrew recalled in a Super exclusive web cam interview. “We basically had VIP passes.” Attack of the clones It’s one of their superpowers. Over the last few years, Andrew Andrew have insinuated themselves into New York’s nightlife, where it’s impossible to attend many parties with the word “launch” in the titles without noticing them. And once you do, it’s impossible to get them out of your head, like an itch at the base of your brain stem: What the hell are they doing? In a culture where everyone feels they deserve at least 15 minutes, where old-line stars jockey for red-carpet position with reality television casualties, the pair has discovered a new category of entertainment, a new kind of celebrity: fame by sheer repetition. They first made a name for themselves as DJs and as offbeat gallery curators with what seemed like a weirdo gimmick. But like any postmodern celebrity phenomenon, they have expanded their brand: They have a fashion line, a home product line, and have even sold baked goods. Their press packet now runs to 87 pages, publicists rush to befriend them, and companies like Levi’s and Pepsi seek out their advice. The more closely you look, however, the more this resume reads like an elaborate parody. When they DJ, they use iPods rather than turntables, sometimes swapping a record sleeve back and forth for visual effect; their fashion line doesn’t produce any actual clothes; their most successful home products are another designer’s porcelain figurines that they’ve spray-painted black. On their income tax forms, under occupation, they write “interventions.” But perhaps this all just boils down to an intervention, or comment, on the nature of fame and entertainment itself. Or is this just an elaborate game? 2 become 1 Every game has a set of rules, and at least in that regard Andrew Andrew fits the definition. They must always look alike, which entails wearing the same thing at all times, from the eyeglasses and shirts, down to the watches, socks and, presumably, undergarments. To avoid disagreements, they settle on a limited collection of outfits for each season—their “look.” At restaurants, they must order the same dishes, and in bars they have the same drinks at the same intervals, to ensure they keep their drunkenness in parity. They watch the same television and films, play the same video games, and read the same books. On Election Day, they vote the same way. At first, the two forced themselves to finish each other’s sentences, something that required rehearsal. Now, living together and spending most of the day together in enforced harmony, they say it comes naturally. They must be photographed as a pair, and always with the same one on the left and the same one on the right. “What we’ve done is we’ve started off with a lifestyle and then we’re working backwards, filling in the details,” said the leftside one. Later, during the interview, rightside Andrew started fiddling with his sweater’s buttons, and then leaned over to his counterpart. “Are you getting hot?” “No. I’m fine.” “Well, then, I guess I’m fine, too.” At which he flashed me a sidelong smile and left his sweater alone. Twice the pun Whenever the Andrews talked to me, they spent a lot of time looking at each other, exchanging pregnant glances, apparently figuring out what they wanted to say. The gestures were not hidden, and more than anything else, they gave the impression of a performance in progress. They re-enacted the show when I asked what they did on their birthdays, which their publicist told me was an off-limits topic. “To be honest with you, that’s the most difficult thing: having a birthday and not celebrating it at all,” leftside Andrew said eventually. Instead, they only observe their collective birthday—the anniversary of their meeting, which they said occurred at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, on September 9, 1999. Later, in New York, after the pair had started working together and dressing similarly, someone stopped them on the street to ask if they were twins. “And we were like, ‘Aha!’ I think that’s how it really started,” said Leftside. By 2001, they had moved in together, abandoning their old clothes, along with much of the lives individually lived in them. Now they get stopped on the street a lot, especially in Las Vegas. It’s as though the expectation of a carnivalesque spectacle actually intensifies their effect. Wherever the two are, the fact they are obviously performing something creates a social contract: You want me to watch you, therefore you owe me an acknowledgment, or, ideally, an explanation. One-two punch It’s a powerful arrangement that has made them a mainstay at a certain class of mid-list publicist-driven events that thrive on spectacle. They show up in everything from book launches to magazine parties. “Marketing people, public relations people, they understand the power,” Leftside said of their twinned lifestyle. “And as a marketing tool, it’s extremely popular. We don’t have to do outreach, people come to us.” They had just returned the previous week from Los Angeles, where they toured Jimmy Choo stores and had meetings to discuss the store displays. Such consulting work earns Andrew Andrew the largest single share of their yearly income, they say. And, in that sense, they are perfectly serious: They’ve enacted a kind of reality show that permeates their entire lives and have built a very real career around it. It’s artifice, but it exists, just like the culture we’ve built up around us. “On one hand, we want to be very mass, we want to be very pop,” Rightside said. “On the other hand, we don’t want to get too big too soon. If everyone has their 15 minutes, we don’t want to use ours up in one afternoon.” | 
