Andrej Pejic’s mum thought he made ‘the most beautiful girl’

The category-busting model is the cover star of New York Magazine’s latest fashion issue. The accompanying profile traces his rise from androgynous unknown to Gaultier bride.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pejic has always been this way. The 19-year-old model loved playing dress-up with girls as a child, and started dying his hair, wearing makeup and shopping for women’s clothes from his young teenage years. He’s never been interested in labels. ‘It’s not like, “Okay, today I want to look like a man, or today I want to look like a woman,”’ he told NYMAg. ‘I want to look like me. It just so happens that some of the things I like are feminine.’

Even so, before there was an Andrej Pejic, stylists, casting agents and editors didn’t know what to do with him. An agency in Australia, where Pejic was raised after his family fled Bosnia, signed him, but told him he wouldn’t get work; London agents were uneasy with his extreme androgyny. It took Carine Roitfeld casting him in a French Vogue shoot and dressing him in Fendi womenswear for the fashion world to take notice.

Since then, Pejic has been unstoppable. The writer quips that, ‘[f]or even a moderately vain female, spending time with Pejic is like losing a race to someone who’s not even running’, and she’s not kidding. He regularly out-struts established female models to coveted finale spots, then turns around and goes straight into the men’s shows. Pejic’s mother couldn’t be more proud—after her son appeared in the Gaultier show, she told an Aussi