Man tried to sue a magazine for using his picture in an article about hipsters looking alike. Then he realised it wasn't him

In what is one of the more bizarre stories to come out of the internet, a man tried to sue a magazine for "slander" after a picture of him was used in an article about a study on hipsters looking the same - only to find out the photo in question wasn't even him.

How do you confuse a stranger's face with your own?

Maybe it had something to do with the photo being in profile...

MIT Technology Review published a story about a scientific study conducted about hipsters in an effort to explain why "anti-conformists always end up looking the same".

(Aside from the obvious, which is that they probably go to the same organic, vintage, second-hand, vegan, animal-friendly clothing co-op.)

A reader said he recognised himself in the photo used in the article, which showed a lightly bearded man in a checked shirt and blue beanie.

Editor Gideon Lichfield said: “As far as I know, calling someone a hipster isn’t slander, no matter how much they may hate it. Still, we would never use a picture without the proper license or model release. So we checked the license."

The investigation yielded interesting results...

Getty looked in their archive for the model release. And came back to us with the surprising news: the model’s name wasn’t the name of our angry hipster-hater.

He added: “In other words, the guy who’d threatened to sue us for misusing his image wasn’t the one in the photo

He’d misidentified himself. All of which just proves the story we ran: hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other.

They wrote to him and ... said, 'We don't think this is you.'

He replied, "Oh, I guess you're right, it's not."

Oh. Dear.

The article was about research into the "hipster effect" by mathematician and neuroscience professor at Brandeis University, Jonathan Touboul.

Go figure.

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