Would be nice if we could get a little notice! I don’t ever buy this rag! ;) My mum used to though, so lets hope her or her friends can get their hands on a copy for me. The interview/article is online, but you have to pay boo. I paid the quid it cost toread it and here it is for all the rest of you. (My small protest at News International there? LOL.)
Laid out exactly as it is on the Times website.
Luke Leitch July 23 2011 3:13PM
Pejic models menswear. And womenswear. Reads Tolstoy. Was just voted the 98th sexiest woman in the world. But is a bloke. Luke Leitch meets him
Andrej Pejic is a gorgeous young man who looks like a gorgeous young woman. That he has finely feminine features is unmissable enough from the many fashion shoots that have made him famous, but up close, in person, even the tiniest details are ladylike. His skin is soft, glowing and delicate, unblemished by stubble. And his eyelashes are so flappily lustrous that I say they must surely be falsies. Outraged, their owner denies it in a broad Australian twang: “No! No! And I don’t think I even have any mascara on them today. What can I say? It’s a gift.”
In the fashion world – where he first emerged modelling menswear at the men’s shows last summer, then womenswear at the next set of men’s shows, and after that womenswear at the women’s shows – Pejic has been embraced. Less than a year after his catwalk debut he’s won ad campaigns for Jean Paul Gaultier and Marc Jacobs, become a top-tier catwalk regular for Givenchy and Paul Smith, and is starting to build an impressive portfolio of magazine covers.
This is not simply because Pejic is an excellent model, although he is – he’s got the face, the lanky build and an effective walk (if a little stompy). The real motor driving Pejic’s lightning acceleration into fashion’s elite, however, is the effect he has on the outside world. He freaks it out. And that’s what fashion thrives on.
The latest beneficiary of the Pejic effect is Dossier, an American magazine that previously had a profile slighter than Pejic’s willowy wrists. But its cover showing the 19-year-old with his hair in curls and torso exposed has changed that. A censor decreed that the issue be covered up before going on sale in Barnes & Noble and Borders. Dossier’s response was to fume delightedly, “We knew that this cover presented a very strong, androgynous image, and that could make some people uncomfortable… I guess it has made someone pretty uncomfortable.” Man boobs (albeit minuscule) that might be mistaken for real boobs sent America’s largest newsagents into a froth of gender confusion.
More confused still was FHM magazine – last month, its readers voted Pejic the 98th sexiest woman in the world. “Pass the sick bucket,” said the magazine of this achievement. “Designers are hailing him as the next big thing. We think ‘thing’ is quite accurate…” Readers complained, and the magazine apologised, blaming this copy on an unnamed member of staff. “FHM has spoken to the individual concerned and taken steps to ensure this can never happen again.” The “blond gender bender” himself went online to declare his disappointment: “98?” he tweeted.
Pejic, sitting next to me on a picnic chair in West London ruminatively stroking the two little moles on his right cheek (Cindy Crawford only had one, the mono-gender amateur), maintains that he is used to this kind of him-her hoo-ha. Long before he became a lightning rod for society’s skewed norms of gender representation, men were endlessly cracking on to him. “Jesus,” he says, “it’s been the story of my life. Ever since I was very young.”
So did he develop strategies for letting down these confused squires gently? As he shakes his head, Pejic’s long, bottle-blond hair dances in the morning sunlight. “If they perceive me as a girl, I’ll just go along with it. And most of the time, with normal guys, they do think I’m a girl. I’m not going to correct them. I don’t feel the need to explain myself.”
And that’s fine, because everybody else just loves trying to explain Pejic. “People seem to think that I’m doing something extraordinary. Everyone perceives it the way they want to: an androgynous boy will be like, ‘I’m you.’ A gay person will be like, ‘Oh, he represents gays,’ and a transsexual person says, ‘He represents transsexuals.’ ” Then there is that straight-man constituency that confusedly hits on him in bars or bans his moobs. Or bristling columnistas who claim it’s an indictment of fashion’s twisted ideal of the female body that it needs to hire a thin guy to showcase women’s clothes – one headline read “Fashion’s ultimate insult to women”.
Reminded of this, Pejic snorts coltishly. “That is c**p. When I’m in a room full of girls in Paris I feel fat. I have bigger hips than them. My body is not seen as ideal for every garment. If I were a girl I’d be considered to have a bone structure that works better with dresses and flowy things – sometimes more sexy things. But when it comes to structural clothing, my body’s not so good, because for that you want a slight frame.”
Of all the clothes he’s modelled, Pejic says the piece he covets most is a Jean Paul Gaultier bridal dress he wore to close the designer’s couture show. “But Rihanna stole it off me.” Today, however, he’s wearing masculine jeans and a slouchy grey cardigan. Pejic may say it’s not his job to explain his ambiguous gender, but he certainly takes pleasure in emphasising it. Today, “A transgender life” is scrawled on his arm (his idea, and penned by Pejic himself), ready for the imminent Times photoshoot. His identity, he says, is, “something I love to play with, and I like to leave it open to artistic interpretation. It’s interesting to see how people react; whether they embrace it or are threatened by it.”
Pejic’s strategy for fending off clumsy questions, he says, is humour. Recently, for instance, he mooted that he would be up for breast enhancement if it won him a place on the Victoria’s Secret catwalk.
Pejic appears immune to the sometimes poisonous rhetoric that surrounds his gender and sexuality. Happily, his formative years provided good training for a globally celebrated gender-bending man-woman.
Pejic was born in Tuzla, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, two months before the outbreak of war. During the conflict Pejic, his brother, his Serbian mother and grandmother headed for Serbia, leaving his Croatian father in Bosnia. (Pejic’s parents are not together and he is reticent when I ask if he has much of a relationship with his dad.)
His early life in Jagodina, a small town near Belgrade, was, says Pejic, “the best you could have had in those conditions. My mum tried to give us the best of everything, so it was a pretty carefree childhood.”
Eventually, however, she realised Serbia was not where she wanted her sons to grow up. “It was the Nato bombings that topped it off. My mum was a lawyer and supported us financially, but she just didn’t see a future for us there, even if she could afford to send us to university.”
So when he was 8, the Pejics flew the coop to Australia. There were no worries about bombing raids in Broadmeadows, the Melbourne suburb to which they moved. Still, it was no picnic. As Pejic puts it, “It’s a working-class area that is not the best place to live because the factories have gone – as per the rapid deindustrialisation of many Western countries – so there is a lot of unemployment and that brings with it social hardship and crime.”
That’s some soundbite for a clotheshorse, and it’s not only Pejic’s looks that are atypical in the modelling world. His mother ensured the boys’ entry to one of Melbourne’s best schools, “academic, open-minded, very liberal”, and he cites Trotsky, Steinbeck and Tolstoy as favourite authors. Today, a grubby, well-thumbed copy of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss rests on the make-up table.
Back in the Balkans, Pejic says he had already “started to exhibit cross-gender behaviour. I played with dolls and Barbies from an early age. It felt natural, and quite instinctive. Some people have said, ‘Well, because you don’t have a father you were geared towards your mother,’ but my brother grew up in the same environment as me and did very boyish things.”
When he was about 11, Pejic says he “really started seeing the differences in the genders, the barriers, and that I couldn’t really afford to do things as I did as a kid”. Why couldn’t you? “Socially, it was inappropriate. So I tried to make other people happy, to be more acceptable, and more boyish.”
Then, aged 14 or so, the boy who had emerged from the Balkans with a profound contempt for Balkanisation – “I’ve seen the poison of nationalism, seen what it can do. I’m allergic to it now. Basing your identity on race just seems ridiculous” – decided to cease basing his identity on gender.
“I had been depressed for a while and came to a point where I was like, ‘F*** it, do I want to make other people happy or do I want to make myself happy?’ ”
So Pejic started bleaching his brown hair blond, or dying it pink, and wearing jeans tighter than a Beyoncé dance routine.
One day, when Pejic was 16, working in McDonald’s (“That’s a gruelling job,” he muses, “just the primitive capitalist environment that you experience”), a local model agent walked in, ordered a cheeseburger, looked up and spotted his server. Along with the burger he took away a promise from Pejic to come into the office. The agency advised Pejic to finish high school and then have a crack at Europe: “They said, ‘You’re unique, but you’re not going to work here.’ ”
Two years later, in February last year, Pejic arrived in London. He toured the agencies but soon became glum. “They were confused about how to market me. They thought I was too feminine for menswear.” With one appointment left, Pejic feared that he’d wasted the money his mother gave him for the flight.
But that appointment was with Sarah Doukas, the owner of Storm (who spotted Kate Moss at an airport). “She said, ‘I’m going to take him on.’ ”
Even before his first shows that June, Pejic bagged a shoot for Vogue Paris. He catwalked for Paul Smith, Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano. It was Gaultier who saw the potential of putting Pejic in feminine kit. Since then, the work has been non-stop.
The challenge, Pejic knows, is to ensure he doesn’t become yesterday’s must-have man-woman. “Fashion is fickle. As soon as you get cheesy, too mainstream, they throw you out. So it’s a balancing act.” Meanwhile, he’s been offered some TV gigs and a few film roles: “European cinema. Acting is not something I ever thought of, but I’m open to it if the role is good.”
And what of his personal life? This is something that Pejic has kept close to his chest. But as our chat is drawing to a close – nearly 70 minutes, because Pejic really is funny, engaging company – he offers me this: “What else can we put in? Romantic life? Well, I consider myself a holy virgin.”
“Why ‘holy’, Andrej?”
“It’s the only way to be a virgin.”
“Umm, do you lack desire, or is it a moral stance?”
“I don’t think I’m a very sexual person, but I do believe in love.”
“And have you ever been in love?”
“No, I don’t think so. But for me, love has no boundaries. I don’t like to limit myself.”
“Have you found yourself attracted to women in fashion?”
“Yeah, there are women I find attractive. It’s less about sexual attraction to me, and more about an emotional one. It’s something I’d like to experience. I’ve never really sought out people, but people have a morbid curiosity with me and really want to give it a try.”
“But you’ve retained that holy virginity?”
“Yes. I’m untouched by a hand bearing such intentions.”
Mysterious indeed…
***
Let the speculation begin! ;)
