2011-7-23 Andrej Pejic in The Times Magazine

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! ;)

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