“In this society, if a man is called a woman, that’s the biggest insult he could get.” The words are Andrej Pejic’s, and he sure has a point. But his life story turns this idea upside down, and then back around again: he has not only been dubbed the prettiest boy in the world – but also, to quote his mother, “the most beautiful girl I’ll ever see in a wedding dress.”
It’s a heart-warming story, the one about Bosnian Andrej who as an 8-year-old moved with his mother and siblings to Melbourne in Australia via Serbia, discovering hair dye and make-up along the way, eventually returning to the more androgyny-friendly Europe to realise his dream of becoming a professional model.
He is the boy who left his “gender open to artistic interpretation” and denied the need for a strong gender identity: “I identify as what I am.” Mixing appearances on men’s catwalks with jobs showcasing women’s collections, Andrej allows fashion gurus to, as New York Magazine puts it, “feel progressive without having to actually challenge the aesthetic norm.”
It’s probably the progressiveness without challenge that rubs me up the wrong way. While Andrej is free to be who he really wants to be – and I salute that whole-heartedly – it’s difficult not to feel like the fashion world is jumping on a very tempting bandwagon that is really only opportunism in disguise. New York Magazine hits the nail on the head over and over again without even realising it, writing that “he is six-foot-one, thin as the stroke of a paintbrush”, that in Melbourne “he was too beautiful to be an obvious choice for men’s campaigns”, and that “spending time with Pejic is like losing a race to someone who’s not even running: if he were not a man, he would be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in the flesh”.
Everyone’s full of praise for Andrej, but while he himself is talking about moving beyond gender, it seems like his employers do nothing but use him to reinforce unobtainable ideals for both men and women. Despite being thin as the stroke of a paintbrush, Andrej admits that he has had to lose weight to fit into women’s wear; at the same time, he didn’t fit the bill for the “relatively macho Australian market”, and still in the US he says that he tries to be stronger when working with men’s wear – and it was not until the then editor-in-chief of French Vogue put him in women’s wear that he really made it as a model.
There’s nothing new about this, really. I think about Rickard Engfors, the Swedish performer and drag queen who was once voted Sweden’s hottest woman. “I lived up to all the female ideals, but I wasn’t good enough as a man,” he told DN. “I was too thin, too unfit, not well-endowed enough” [my translation].
Andrej talks about how his behaviour wasn’t acceptable for a boy, how he “closed in” for years before eventually letting the platinum blonde out. A moment of freedom for him, of course; but it seems sadly ironic that the fashion industry confirmed that it still isn’t acceptable for a boy – that you don’t make it as a boy with platinum hair, you make it as a boy who is constantly assumed to be a woman. Or, like Rickard, as a drag queen.
What really made me think twice, initially, was probably the fact that I didn’t hesitate for a second when I saw a picture of Andrej on the catwalk, shirt unbuttoned to reveal a flat, hairless chest: to me, Andrej was doubtlessly a woman. Why? Because not even the complete lack of breasts would make me question the catwalk ideals that are so ingrained in my way of thinking. In the world of fashion, voluptuous doesn’t cut it – no womb or ovaries or oestrogen will ever win over “the impossibly hipless and curveless women the fashion industry fetishizes” [sic].
And that’s what I take away from all of this: that women are no longer unfeminine enough to fit the bill in a fashion world that can’t deal with diversity but is still as focused on gender as ever, that still indeed differentiates between men’s and women’s collections, no matter how much they brag that they don’t want to put their models in a box. To me, that’s got nothing to do with “side-stepping the gender issue”. Andrej may be beautiful and flexible enough to work on both sides of the gender divide, but he’s still always forced to act either/or: strong and masculine or brittle and feminine.
Androgyne appears to be the new pinup, but the way we talk about gender tells a tale. The masculine and the feminine are still as defined as ever – most of us are just never quite good enough. And that dissatisfaction, of course, is the secret to the success of the fashion industry.
