Andreja Pejic is accustomed to stares. As she sips English breakfast tea in the lobby lounge of Manhattan’s trendy Bowery Hotel, just blocks from her apartment in the East Village, people at other tables shoot her covert glances and sneak phone pics, but she takes it in her stride. It’s hard to blame them.
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.”
Andreja Pejic through the years
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.
M odelling in 2012 before transitioning (Adam Berry/Getty)
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.”
With Kelly Osbourne in 2012 (John Shearer/Getty)
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).
Walking for Giles in 2015 (Ian Gavan/Getty)
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?”
Andreja Pejic on changing the face of fashion as a transgender model and why one day she would ...
Pack your bags and head to Downton Nashville, on May 27, 2016, to Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Bellissima! The Italian Automotive Renaissance, 1945–1975 marks an unprecedented gathering of rare and stunning Italian-designed automobiles and motorcycles in a museum setting. The exhibition celebrates the streamlined elegance, novel and powerful engineering, and seductive allure characterizing Italian coachbuilt cars, concept cars, and motorcycles produced during the post–World War II economic revival. On view only at the Frist Center through October 9, 2016, Bellissima! boasts 22 extraordinary vehicles from private collections and museums that are now among the most sought-after collector cars in the world.
Highlights include the ultra-rare trio of mid-1950s Alfa Romeo Berlinetta Aerodinamica Tecnicas, known as BATs, whose curvaceous fins and tapered tails suggest the curving wings and bullet-like bodies of bats in flight. The 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO is considered by design critic and exhibition catalogue contributor Robert Cumberford to be “the most desirable of all sports cars ever made.” The game-changing Lamborghini Miura, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, is a technical tour de force and as Ken Gross writes in the exhibition catalogue, “resembles a stiletto on cast magnesium wheels.”
Lesser-known vehicles in the exhibition will offer surprises for even the most knowledgeable car aficionados. The drastically slender 1970 Lancia Stratos’ mere 33-inch-tall wedge-shaped body has doors that open vertically rather than swinging outward. The futuristic, arrow-shaped 1955 Ghia Gilda, named for Rita Hayworth’s slinky character in the film Gilda, has an elongated hood, snug cockpit, pointy rear fenders and jet-like engine whine that evoke advanced aircraft design.
The motorcycles on display are the 1957 Moto Guzzi V-8 “Otto”, a bike revered for its exceptional speed and radical “dustbin” fairing concealing its 8-cylinder engine; a 1973 MV Agusta 750 Sport, widely considered “the Ferrari of motorcycles” for its race-bred handling, brash aesthetics and thrilling exhaust “music”; and the 1974 Ducati 750 Super Sport that, as Gross said, “catapulted the status of the small Bolognese firm from interesting to legendary.”
