On her makeup evolution: "I would go through my mother's makeup kit, and I think she thought it was really cute. I was only three or four years old. But then I had to stop to fit into social norms—until the age of 13, when I went through an emo phase. I experimented with dark eyeliner, really light foundation, and skinny jeans. It was a way of expressing myself through this kind of subculture...being able to look pretty without having to explain too much. My look evolved from that, becoming more and more feminine. I would sneak a little eye shadow before I went to class every morning. Maybe a bit of blush. During one period when I started hanging out with the popular girls, we'd use heaps of orange bronzer. But those were the days of Paris Hilton and The Simple Life."
On working in the shadows: "I have a very angular face, so my makeup routine is focused around softening my features, and I've finally learned how to contour to my advantage. A makeup artist once told me, 'Highlight and contour are the bra, and blush is the breast.' You concentrate on doing the highlight and the darkening, then use a little blush to fill out the breast."
On her secret weapon: "I keep Make Up For Ever Brow Seal in my pocket all the time because I have big, bushy eyebrows, and I need to keep them sleek. That's probably the product I use most."
On her role models: "I'm six foot one, so I'm very inspired by these sort of Amazon beauties. Veruschka, to me, is God. Growing up I was quite self-conscious about getting too tall, but then I realized, You know what? I can use it to my advantage. Big is beautiful."
On her recipe for flawless skin: "I've recently gotten really into matcha. It's like drinking ten green teas in one serving, and it's amazing for your skin. I take biotin and silica for my hair to grow faster, but it's good for your skin, too. For skin care, I've used Paula's Choice ever since I was young. I also like doing masks in the shower, either Jurlique or GlamGlow. A line that I recently discovered is iS Clinical. Their Eclipse SPF 50 is a great lightweight daily moisturizer. I've been using SPF in the summers and winters since I was 16—it's the best anti-aging product."
On scoring a makeup contract: "After I completed my transition and was living my life completely as a woman, I decided to share my story with the public. I thought, Whatever happens, happens. When Make Up For Ever approached me [about a contract], it was very early on in the transgender movement—even before Caitlyn [Jenner]. I was like, Wow. I didn't expect that so soon. It's major for any model to have a makeup contract. For me, it's a great career step, but it's also nice just to show that this is possible. I can do what any other girl can do."
Not only is the 6ft 1in 24-year-old Bosnian, who was raised as a refugee in Australia, among the most in-demand fashion models of our era - unsurprising, considering her cut-crystal cheekbones and symmetry so flawless that it almost seems android - but she also has an irresistible back story.
First scouted as a willowy 17-year-old boy working at a Melbourne McDonald’s, she was brought to Europe as a tantalisingly androgynous newcomer who walked the men’s runway for Marc Jacobs and donned both men’s and women’s clothes for Jean Paul Gaultier. She was touted as “living between two genders”, a narrative that fitted the fashion industry’s fresh fetish for sexually ambiguous beauty. But in 2014 Pejic announced that she was, in fact, a transgender woman and would undergo what is now largely referred to as gender-confirmation surgery.
“It’s been quite a ride since then,” she says, her voice refined and melodious with a slight Aussie twang, as she folds a lock of long blonde hair behind her ear.
She carries herself regally, despite casually chic attire - an oversized white cashmere turtle-neck, jeans and cowboy boots. “When you’ve been through so much in such a short time, it takes your body and your mind quite a while to catch up, to settle down.”
In fact, on most levels, she doesn’t seem to be settling down at all. Instead, she is ramping up in ways that she never could have imagined just a year or two ago, most notably by appearing on the Paris catwalk earlier this month as part of the H&M Studio show (below).
Elsewhere, with carefully chosen events including a TEDx talk, a recent podcast for Foreign Affairs and a keynote address in February at a Human Rights Campaign event, she has become an elegant, measured voice for transgender acceptance on an international level, a Grace Kelly-like antidote to Caitlyn Jenner’s brash, Hollywood tell-all style. It’s hard to know what’s more surprising: that this ur-female spent most of her life in a male body or that someone who could so easily skate by on her beauty has decided not to.
“I’m a bit of a nerd, an introvert by nature, so I’m still working on being comfortable with public speaking,” says Pejic, who was a standout student at secondary school and hopes one day to go to university.
“I just feel as though it’s the right thing to do. In generations past the ideal if you were trans was to disappear, to move to another place and start afresh. That was the best they could hope for. But I got famous first. I didn’t have the option of anonymity. And, of course, we’ve moved past that kind of thinking. Now - at least I hope - the ideal is to incorporate your past, to inhabit it while you’re becoming yourself. I think it’s my responsibility to be truthful in as many ways as I can.”
She is grateful for the years spent as a male model, which enabled her to see the world and make real money - she was raised by a single mother in refugee camps before going to Australia aged eight. But living a lie (her agent believed the industry wasn’t ready for a transgender supermodel) also took its toll.
Just months before she announced she would transition surgically, New York magazine put her on its cover, naked to the waist with the bony flat chest of an adolescent, her face fully made up. The headline was “Male model of the year”. Having been “out” to her family and friends as transgender since her early teens (she bought hormone-blockers illegally on the internet to stave off puberty) pretending to be a boy, albeit an androgynous one, left her full of sadness and self-doubt.
“It was a time that was really great on so many levels and also really difficult for me. Working that way made me famous and gave me a career but it wasn’t what I would have chosen,” she recalls.
All of that changed as attitudes toward transgender issues began to shift and, at the same moment, she was at last able to afford the surgery. Not all trans people change their bodies but for Pejic it felt necessary. “The timing has been amazing,” she says. “I just stop and think, ‘Oh my god, what if this was even 10, 20 years ago?’”
A student of gender dysphoria through history - she has steeped herself in Virginia Woolf and the writings of Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg - she is working on a documentary that will explore transgender models who hid their pasts.
One idol is Caroline Cossey, the British beauty who worked under the name Tula. In the 1970s she was a Page 3 girl and appeared in Australian Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Outed by journalists, she wrestled with suicidal thoughts before writing two successful memoirs.
Despite her commitment to speaking out Pejic is loath to define herself purely by gender. It’s a trap, she thinks, to reduce yourself to your sex. Before she got the surgery she spent too much time thinking about it, longing to bring her body in line with her mind. But now she no longer has to dwell on it. “Other women don’t go around saying ‘Wow, I’m female’. They have room in their lives for other things. That’s my goal.”
Pejic isn’t the type to get easily offended by those to whom gender issues are still a bit confusing. That’s surprising in a world where young people, especially at British universities and on US college campuses, debate “micro-aggressions” and prize “safe, conflict-free spaces”.
She doesn’t get upset when people ask her rude technical questions about her anatomy or use the wrong pronoun. “I choose not to wallow in my pain,” she says. “There are a lot of things that are unfortunate in the world and you have to be resilient. Identity politics are really divisive. They separate people instead of unifying them as human. They cause you to believe that your own group is the most downtrodden. To me, the important thing is to constantly look outside yourself, to see what you can do in the greater universe.”
Such equanimity isn’t easy in an industry obsessed with appearances, she concedes. “Look, I’m a model. It’s a catty business. I have the usual insecurities, compounded by my unique ones from being trans. But you have to remind yourself that beauty is a fleeting thing and in the end, no matter who you are, you need to develop your substance.”
How can you spend your time worrying about a random spot, she wonders aloud, when someone like Tara Hudson, a 26-year-old post-operative transgender woman from Bath, was kept for nearly 12 months in an all-male prison just because she didn’t fill out a piece of paperwork? “There are just so many more important, scarier things that need to be addressed all over the world. They make you realise your priorities.”
For Pejic, succeeding as a female model is an overtly political act. After her surgery she made a conscious decision to abandon more work with the edgier niche brands, the kinds with no qualms about being associated with her (she has kept her beauty contract - the most lucrative part of the industry - with Make-up Forever).
With her sort of features - classic, mainstream - why not go after Chanel or Dior? Real progress, she says, will come when such corporate-controlled labels “realise their business won’t fall apart if there’s a trans model in their campaign”. She understands that, for now, her background sets her apart, maybe even gives her an advantage, but she wishes clients would judge her as they do other top-tier models. “One day,” she says, “I would like to be just another girl.”
Pejic is more comfortable talking politics than she is about her personal life. Although she has a boyfriend these days she admits she is “pretty immature, a little stunted, about the whole thing with men”. Partly that’s a reflection of the years she spent in gender limbo, but also it’s a matter of her reserved nature. “I don’t fall in love easily,” she says. “My girlfriends joke that I’m an ice princess. But a lot of them fall in love rashly and it’s a disaster. Then they turn to me and say, ‘I wish I had a helping of your ice’.”
Such self-possession is just part of being careful and smart, thinking everything through, planning for a long and serious future. “That’s who I am,” she says. “It has nothing to do with gender. It’s much deeper than that. I mean, aren’t most important things deeper than that?”
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