Andrej Pejic is a walking headline.
The 19 year-old’s latest publicity bonanza: last week’s storm in a polybag over his topless cover of the current edition of Brooklyn, New York-based arts journal Dossier (above).
According to Dossier’s distributor, several US chains requested the issue be sold in an opaque plastic bag – the treatment usually meted out to porn magazines – because, the distributor reported, they were advised that ”The model is young and it could be deemed as a naked female.” Although Barnes & Noble and Borders were widely reported to be the Dossier-censoring chains in question, Barnes & Noble has since flatly denied the claims and according to the distributor, no polybagging was, in the end, required at any US retailer.
What says Pejic of the brouhaha?
“I think the gender of the topless person on the cover is irrelevant” Pejic tells Motilo from Germany. “The question we should pose is, whether this is porn or art? Art should never be censored in a democratic society. But I have just been named the 98th sexiest woman in the world [by FHM Magazine] and I’m currently filming a porn movie so this is a tricky one. But at the end of the day the cover is a COVER and it’s doing everything that a cover should do. Grabbing attention, that is.”
It took Pejic two years to hit the international fashion scene after taking up modelling in his home town of Melbourne. But once officially registered on its radar at the Paris menswear shows in June 2010, the blonde, Bosnian-born bombshell who (pending the hair, makeup and styling) is equally – and uniquely – adept at modelling womenswear as he is menswear, has never been far from the news.
After dazzling with a series of photoshoots lensed by some of the fashion world’s biggest photographic names, from Steven Meisel to Juergen Teller, Mert + Marcus and Inez + Vinood, opposite some of the biggest female modelling stars, for Vogue Italia, Vogue Paris, Vogue Turkey, i-D, Zeit Magazin, Jean Paul Gaultier and Marc Jacobs, among others, in January Pejic became arguably the first man to ever walk a Paris haute couture runway in a dress – closing Jean Paul Gaultier’s spring/summer 2011 show as the traditional couture bride.
Amongst the global headlines, the Daily Mail attempted to incite outrage from readers, noting that the casting of a 19 year-old boy to model womens’ clothes is “fashion’s ultimate insult” in the body image debate.
That’s as may be, but it nevertheless missed the salient point that in Gaultier’s wedding dress – and whether engineered by nature, corsetry or artificial enhancement [read: female hormones] – Pejic actually managed to look curvaceous.
It’s hard to know when Pejic is pulling one’s leg.
According to his Australian mother agency Chadwick Models, an Italian film production company did recently attempt to secure Pejic for a job, however that film did not eventuate. The agency is unaware of any “porn” film.
Numerous unsuspecting media outlets have run with Pejic’s many and varied accounts of how he first came to the attention of model scouts: at the airport, at KFC, at McDonalds, selling fruit in a Melbourne market and in a cornfield.
The truth is a little more prosaic: in May 2008 he sent shots to Chadwick’s Melbourne office, which signed him.
So, is he really doing a porn film?
“Every celeb needs a sex tape, lol” he quips.
After being asked by Hilary Alexander at the Telegraph whether he would consider a sex change, Pejic responded that he would consider one if offered a Victoria’s Secret contract. Was he joking?
“Well I may as well get paid for it. Right?” notes Pejic, who also declined comment on the subject of whether or not he is taking female hormones. “Oh can’t beauty be natural these days?”
But just how is Pejic handling the unrelenting global media attention, which may well have turned him into a modelling superstar, but which has also generated much homophobic commentary on newspaper websites in Australia and even Serbian television?
“Sometimes I feel like I wanna rip my weave out and go to church” he jokes, before adding, on a more serious note, “The media has been very attentive, which I find interesting and which is opening a lot of doors. The gender bender angle is fine. It’s just the way some people describe or write about it that I find really backward and often just cheesy.”.
http://magazine.motilo.com/andrej-pejic-and-his-controversial-body/
