It’s a thought we’ve all had as we gaze into the bathroom mirror, watching the slow passage of time etch itself across our faces like a living bar graph of human decay. ”Why am I this?” we wonder, tears welling up in our wrinkled eyes and dripping down onto the blasted landscape of our endlessly imperfect skin. “Why can’t I be Sisqó instead?”
Now one man is living that dream, with Page Six reporting that an industrious New Yorker has employed his God-given gifts—i.e., looking a little bit like Sisqó—to make a splash at New York’s famed Fashion Week. Clad in velvet, and reportedly saying Sisqó-esque things like “I just played a show at the hottest club in the Meatpacking District, or “Thong, thong-thong-thong-thong,” fake Sisqó apparently made quite the impression, securing front row seats for high-profile shows like Kanye West’s Yeezy Season Five presentation. He was only caught when he tried to talk his way onto a private jet headed to the Caribbean, at which point someone noticed that his passport listed his name as “Gavin Barnes”—not Sisqó’s real name—and that he would have been 13 when “Thong Song” came out. (Security guards could have been forgiven, though, for thinking that Sisqó, like the man’s own appreciation for dumps like a truck, truck, truck, was immortal.)
Page Six contacted Barnes for a comment. When reached, he said, “I never said I was Sisqó. People thought I was him, and that wasn’t cool.” (He also denied that his last name was Barnes, because the life of a professional Sis-faux is a snake eating its own beautifully blonde-dyed tail.) The real Sisqó—who’s touring in Vegas at the moment—is aware of his fashion-minded doppelganger; his manager responded to questions about the impostor by saying, “Management has no idea who this guy is. It’s flattering, I guess.”