“When I first met Andrej, I didn’t think, What a beautiful boy or girl,” Doukas says. “I was walking in a street without an umbrella-it was a really dramatic, kind of movie moment-and I was just like, ‘Oh my God, I came to London, I spent my mom’s money, I’m not even gonna get an agency.’ ” He giggles in a low register and continues, “It was like Madonna going to Hollywood.” At Storm, the fifth agency he visited, owner Sarah Doukas-known for discovering Kate Moss-decided to take a chance on him. “I remember it was raining and horrible,” he tells me. The next year, after Pejic graduated from high school and moved to London, his extreme androgyny made it difficult for him even to secure a British agent. When he first showed up at the Chadwick agency in Melbourne, Australia, the town where he grew up, he was quickly signed and just as quickly told he would be unlikely to find much work in the relatively macho Australian market: He was too beautiful to be an obvious choice for men’s campaigns, but he was not actually a woman. “It’s sort of a berry,” he’d answered, at which point she ducked into the changing room and began dabbing the same shade on her own pout.Īnd so in moments like the one on Lafayette Street, when Pejic is the object of a clearly heterosexual advance, he does not usually choose to disabuse the potential suitor of his confusion, in part because he knows that the mistake is a fair one. “What color did you use on his lips?” one of the women milling about the studio had asked the makeup artist. He had just come from a shoot for a Spanish magazine where he had shown to good effect a number of items generally considered to be in women’s domain: a floor-length wrap dress, a fur coat, a wide-brimmed felt hat, and, toward the end of the day, a rosy lip stain. That day, in addition to the shorts, Pejic was sporting a lacy black blouse over a black tank top, long blond hair, and smoky eyes. “Man!” He shook his head in amazement and reluctantly continued down the street, completely unaware that the woman he had just encountered was not a woman at all but was in fact Andrej Pejic, a male model who has garnered much attention in the fashion world for his recent success modeling women’s clothing. “Oh, different places,” the model demurred. “Shoot! Where are you, you know, illustrated in?” “You’re gorgeous.” The man whistled through his teeth. The model peered down at him and gamely grinned. “Hey! Hey, you!” he called out in a thick Brooklyn accent, sidling up.
One evening in late July, a fashion model in very short shorts was walking down Lafayette Street when a middle-aged guy in a baseball cap, pudgy and plodding, stopped dead in his tracks.
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