Andre Pejic: Moving Beyond Gender

More repressive desublimation?

"Though he may not exactly bristle at the gender distinctions made by others, he does question their underlying assumptions. “In this society, if a man is called a woman, that’s the biggest insult he could get.” He arches his eyebrows skeptically and asks, “Is that because women are considered something less?” Later, he tells me, “I know people want me to sort of defend myself, to sit here and be like, ‘I’m a boy, but I wear makeup sometimes.’ But, you know, to me, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t really have that sort of strong gender identity—I identify as what I am. The fact that people are using it for creative or marketing purposes, it’s just kind of like having a skill and using it to earn money.”

Androgyny has been a selling point in the fashion world at least since Coco Chanel jettisoned corsets in favor of sailor suits, but it’s always been a trickier, and more sexualized, endeavor with men. In the sixties, April Ashley’s career was destroyed when she was discovered to be a transsexual. Since then, there has generally been a level of campiness to men who modeled as women: Teri Toye, Connie Girl, and Candy Darling, Andy Warhol’s transgendered muse, all had a quality Pejic refers to as “We’re fabulous; fuck off” and which he views as less progressive ­because it drew attention to gender rather than moving beyond it. What he and others like the transsexual runway model Lea T (who was in a recent Riccardo Tisci campaign for Givenchy) are doing is sidestepping the gender issue altogether by not only passing as women but even managing to be a more ideal version of the impossibly hipless and curveless women the fashion industry fetishizes. Designers can use them and feel progressive without having to actually challenge the aesthetic norm.

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