Issue Seven
Issue Seven teaser: Rebecca Howden ‘Boys in Skirts — Andrej Pejic and Androgyny’
In our final sneak peek into Issue Seven of Kill Your Darlings before its release on October 3, Rebecca Howden investigates the rise to fame of Andrej Pejic – the androgynous boy from Broadmeadows who set the fashion world abuzz.
At the Paris men’s fashion shows in June 2010, there was one question everyone was asking: ‘Who’s the blonde girl?’ It was Andrej Pejic, the 19-year-old Broadmeadows boy who’s taken the fashion industry’s breath away; whipping up a storm of delight, confusion and anticipation about androgyny in fashion.
Whippet-thin with impossibly long legs and a cascade of bottle-blonde hair, Pejic naturally turns heads. His striking Slavic features (he was born in Bosnia; his mother is Serbian and his father is Croatian) give him an astonishing beauty, but it’s his penchant for playing around with feminine clothing, accessories and hairstyles that has really captured people’s attention.
The look is Pejic’s own. From the age of 14, he started experimenting, bleaching his hair and trying different kinds of women’s clothing. ‘As a kid, you get to the stage where you realise the gender barriers that exist in society, and what you’re supposed to do and not supposed to do,’ he told the UK Telegraph earlier this year. ‘I really tried being someone else during that period. It was hard for me – not being able to express myself and feeling I had to be someone else. But now I’m comfortable in my skin, and for my look to be celebrated is great.’
Pejic was discovered by Chadwick Models in Melbourne just before his seventeenth birthday, and whisked off to model in Paris, Milan and New York as soon as he finished school. Jean-Paul Gaultier designed his autumn/winter 2011 menswear show entirely around Pejic as the keynote model, ‘James Blond’. A week later, Pejic brought down the house at Gaultier’s haute-couture womenswear show, utterly mesmerising as a sensual, show-stopping bride. Today, he’s the hottest thing on two legs – a designer’s dream who walks in high-end shows for Givenchy, features in ads for Marc by Marc Jacobs, and stars in fashion spreads for Vogue and i-D – wearing dresses, stilettos, corsets, skirts, and sometimes nothing at all.
I’m not exactly what you’d call a fashionista. There’s something too clumsy and unpolished about me, too inherently un-glamorous to ever be a part of that world. I admire fashion from afar, grabbing on to ideas or trends as they attract me instead of following it feverishly. But like most people, I’m dazzled by beauty – that surprising, utterly enthralling kind of beauty that touches something inside you and actually makes you ache.
The things I find the most beautiful are often the most unusual. And that’s what’s so intriguing about Pejic: he makes you look twice. At first glance of his milky-white figure, he has the same lithe, ethereal beauty we’re used to seeing in magazines. Then you notice there’s something different about his bone structure, something that isn’t quite the same as all the girls. In some pictures, the incongruity of his look – the flatness of his bare chest, the delicacy of his facial features – is emphasised to striking effect. It challenges the viewer to wonder: how is it that someone can look so excruciatingly pretty and still be a man?
– Rebecca Howden is a freelance writer and postgraduate student based in Melbourne. She blogs occasionally at rebeccahowden.com.au.
Pre-order Kill Your Darlings Issue Seven, or subscribe to the print journal here.
One Response to Issue Seven teaser: Rebecca Howden ‘Boys in Skirts — Andrej Pejic and Androgyny’
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Kill Your Darlings, No. 9
April 2012 The Stella Prize
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10:04 am, September 30, 2011
I. LOVE. YOUR. ARTICLE :P
You are are right with everything you say, plus, he is such a cute person! I met him in Berlin and he was so sweet, seemed to not even be aware of being famous :)