GMHC - FASHION FORWARD 2011 [60 sec. w credits] from Jonathan Turner on Vimeo.
For even a moderately vain female, 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—which, in his case, is flawless and poreless and has an English-rose luster. His mussed blond locks and the rounded width of his cheekbones bring to mind a young Brigitte Bardot. At 19 years old, he is six-foot-one, thin as the stroke of a paintbrush, and wears a women’s size 11 shoe, which he says is hard to find in couture but is sometimes carried at DSW. He is fey but not flamboyant. His only apparent physical imperfection is a pair of moles that hover gracefully over his lip on the right side of his slightly feline face. They are sometimes, albeit rarely, Photoshopped out.
For the shoot, Pejic is to channel a young Judy Garland while dressed in a short brown wig, ripped fishnet tights, an A-line skirt, and a tuxedo jacket. “Do you want, like, a drunk Judy Garland?” hairstylist Raymond McLaren asks of Bergman, who does not deign to answer. McLaren begins stuffing Pejic’s hair up under a wig cap. “If I didn’t have a wife and two kids and a pit bull, I’d ask you out,” he ventures.
Pejic smiles politely. “And I might say yes.”
“What did you do before you were you?”
“I was cleaning toilets in a strip club,” Pejic replies, not missing a beat.
“Really?” McLaren fingers a hairpin. “Fuck yeah, man.”
Pejic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia, several months before the start of the Bosnian war. His family was middle-class—Pejic’s Serbian mother was a lawyer, and his Croatian father an economist—but the war put his parents’ nationalities on opposite sides of the regional divide. When his mother, Jadranka, fled to Serbia with Pejic and his older brother, Igor, his father stayed behind. The family was granted refugee status when Pejic was 8, and Jadranka moved with her mother and children to Broadmeadows, a working-class suburb of Melbourne, and went back to school to become a teacher. “I was like, ‘I’ll go if I get a new PlayStation,’ ” says Pejic. “That’s how you think at that age.”
Though he remembers the NATO bombings, he describes his childhood as fairly carefree. He liked to play dress-up with the girls, pretending to be the Gypsy woman from his favorite South American soap opera. When he came to realize that his behavior was no longer viewed as acceptable for a boy, he says, he “closed in” for several years, but by age 13, “I just went, ‘Fuck it.’ I let the platinum blond out.” He dyed his hair and started wearing skinny jeans, which gave way to shopping in the women’s aisle and putting on makeup. “The way I need to look, it’s a very personal thing,” Pejic explains. “When I started experimenting, it was to make myself feel happy, to look in the mirror and be satisfied. I never did drag or anything like that. It was always that I wanted to be pretty, to look beautiful, as a girl would want to.”
Pejic was initially worried about how his family would respond, but quickly learned he needn’t be. Igor proved protective of a brother who, more and more, was acting like a sister. Their father was a continent away (Pejic says they talk on the phone, but rarely). As for his mother and grandmother, he explains that “both of them sacrificed their lives for their children, so to just turn their back on them because of a natural thing would be quite strange.” His mother’s main concern was his safety, but high marks earned him a spot at a selective high school in central Melbourne known for being artsy and progressive (Olivia Newton-John is an alum), and elsewhere he found he could actually pass as a teenage girl. “Even walking in this industrial area, people just didn’t notice,” says Pejic. “That was kind of my little escape.” His current success is a source of pride: “My mum follows everything and posts everything on Facebook and tells all her friends.” When Jadranka saw images of her son as the Gaultier bride, she told the Australian program Sunday Night, “He’s the most beautiful girl I’ll ever see in a wedding dress.”
By now, Pejic has fully embraced a look of gender-bending, rocker couture: ripped jeans and cut-up T-shirts and shorts that would seem to leave nothing to the imagination except that, in his case, they obviously do. “It’s not like, ‘Okay, today I want to look like a man, or today I want to look like a woman,’ ” he says. “I want to look like me. It just so happens that some of the things I like are feminine.”
"Model of the moment Andrej Pejic has landed yet another gig: he’s stepped off the runway and gone back behind the camera to model the look book for indie New York label MadeMe.
Pejic just walked in both mens and womenswear in the same show at Sao Paulo fashion week, closing Lino Villaventura’s spring show like the supermodel he’s fast becoming. He’s modeled for Jean Paul Gaultier and Marc by Marc Jacobs but, as MadeMe’s designer Erin Magee found out, he’s not above modeling for a super small New York label. (In fact, he showed up a half hour early to the shoot.)
Magee, 31, has been in fashion for nine years. She got her start working for Louis Vuitton’s Kim Jones when he was at Umbro and still works full time managing production for Supreme. She’s been designing MadeMe, her passion project, on the side for the past four years (it’s sold at OAK and Colette). This year’s fall collection is comprised of just four pieces and Magee knew that Pejic had to be the one to model them.
“The clothes I make are quite androgynous anyway,” said Magee. “I do mens styles in a feminine fit so he was the perfect model for me.”
Magee even said she styled Pejic less feminine than he’d styled himself when he walked in for the shoot. “I think he dresses on his own a lot more feminine then i had him in the look book,” she said. “I just wanted to keep him natural and keep people guessing about him and the clothes–make them think, ‘Is this for women or is this for men?’”
So does Magee keep you guessing? Take a look at MadeMe’s fall collection, modeled by Pejic, shot at the Bowery hotel."
"Outside the fashion world, folks aren’t quite sure what to make of androgynous male model Andrej Pejic. Borders and Barnes & Nobles censored his topless cover for Dossier Journal, and men’s mag FHM appallingly referred to him as a “thing” when listing the in-demand model as number 98 on their “Hot 100 Women” list.
Thankfully, within the fashion world, Pejic is accepted and in demand. He’s served as muse to Jean Paul Gaultier, landed Marc by Marc Jacob’s spring campaign, and been featured in numerous high fashion editorials. Last night, at Brazilian designer Lino Villaventura’s spring 2012 show in Sao Paulo, he proved he is also a catwalk star. Pejic walked twice: first in menswear, and then he closed the show in women’s evening wear–holding the packed room rapt as he vogued at the end of the runway. From my seat below the photographer’s pit, I could see that Pejic was trembling a bit even as he nailed pose after pose at the end of the runway. Watch Pejic do his thing." -Fashionista
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