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When 15-year-old Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux realised an Associated Press photo of him at the Louvre on the day of the crown jewels heist had drawn millions of views, his first instinct was not to rush online and unmask himself.
Quite the opposite. A fan of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot who lives with his parents and grandfather in Rambouillet, 30km (19 miles) from Paris, Pedro decided to let the mystery linger.
As theories swirled about the sharply dressed stranger in the “fedora man” shot – detective, insider, AI fake – he decided to stay silent and watch.
“I didn’t want to say immediately it was me,” he said. “With this photo there is a mystery, so you have to make it last.”
Pedro is a bright teenager who wandered, by accident, into a global story.
The image that made him famous was meant to document a crime scene. Three police officers lean on a silver car blocking a Louvre entrance, hours after thieves carried out a daylight raid on French crown jewels. To the right, a lone figure in a three-piece ensemble strides past – a flash of film noir in a modern-day manhunt.
The internet did the rest. “Fedora man”, as users dubbed him, was cast as an old-school detective, an inside man, a Netflix pitch – or not human at all. Many were convinced he was AI-generated.
Pedro understood why. “In the photo, I’m dressed more in the 1940s, and we are in 2025,” he said. “There is a contrast.”
Even some relatives and friends hesitated – until they spotted his mother in the background. Only then were they sure: the internet’s favourite fake detective was a real boy.
The real story was simple. Pedro, his mother and grandfather had come to visit the Louvre.
“We wanted to go to the Louvre but it was closed,” he said. “We didn’t know there was a heist.”
They asked officers why the gates were shut. Seconds later, AP photographer Thibault Camus, documenting the security cordon, caught Pedro midstride.
“When the picture was taken, I didn’t know,” Pedro said. “I was just passing through.”
Four days later, an acquaintance messaged: is that you?
“She told me there were 5 million views,” he said. “I was a bit surprised.”
Then his mother called to say he was in the New York Times. “It’s not every day,” he said. Cousins in Colombia, friends in Austria, family friends and classmates followed with screenshots and calls.
“People said, ‘You’ve become a star,’” he said. “I was astonished that just with one photo you can become viral in a few days.”
The look that jolted tens of millions is not a costume whipped up for a museum trip. Pedro began dressing this way less than a year ago, inspired by 20th-century history and black-and-white images of suited statesmen and fictional detectives.
“I like to be chic,” he said. “I go to school like this.”
And the hat? No, that’s its own ritual. The fedora is reserved for weekends, holidays and museum visits.
He understands why people projected a whole sleuth character onto him: improbable heist, improbable detective. He loves Poirot – “very elegant” – and likes the idea that an unusual crime calls for someone who looks unusual. “When something unusual happens, you don’t imagine a normal detective,” he said. “You imagine someone different.”
That instinct fits the world he comes from. His mother, Félicité Garzon Delvaux, grew up in an 18th-century museum-palace, daughter of a curator and an artist – and regularly takes her son to exhibits.
“Art and museums are living spaces,” she said. “Life without art is not life.”
For Pedro, art and imagery were part of everyday life. So when millions projected stories on to a single frame of him in a fedora beside armed police at the Louvre, he recognised the power of an image and let the myth breathe.
He stayed silent for several days, then switched his Instagram from private to public.
“People had to try to find who I am,” he said. “Then journalists came, and I told them my age. They were extremely surprised.”
He is relaxed about whatever comes next. “I’m waiting for people to contact me for films,” he said, grinning. “That would be very funny.”
