'The most famous unknown man ever.' Internet sleuths chase the identity of an unnamed Westerner who starred in mattress ads across China.
HONG KONG— Sam Voutas, an Australian writer and filmmaker, remembers clearly the first time he saw the billboard in
A generation of expatriates and world travelers passed the man slapped on billboards at airports in the U.S., Australia and China, not knowing his true identity. The mystery spawned Reddit threads, blog posts and YouTube videos by fans seeking to know who he was. Rather than sate the curious, the disclosure triggered more questions about Mr. Kingman and the company that raised his visage from obscurity to ubiquity.
The company referred to its prospectus in response to a request for comment, noting it was currently in the so-called silent period before its IPO. “He was so thin. Like the opposite of comfort,” said Ms. Concas. She was so intrigued she made an eight-minuteA De Rucci advertisement on a Hong Kong bus in 2019.The Wall Street Journal in its own examination of public records found no person named Timothy James Kingman in the U.S. and no one with that name registered living in China. A public-records database turned up an American named “ Timothy J. Kingman, ” born in 1943 and who died on June 1, 2012.
Mr. Dirstine’s sister, Joann Hansen, of Port Hadlock-Irondale, Wash., said her brother had lived in China during his later years but was puzzled by the notion that he was featured in ads world-wide. She shared little else about him.in the alumni magazine of Seattle Preparatory School, where Mr. Dirstine graduated from high school in 1962, showed him as a young tuxedoed man, with the same unmistakable features as China’s mattress man.