The androgynous model French designer Jean Paul Gaultier called his “otherworldly beauty” is now an Elle cover girl.
Twenty-one-year-old Andrej Pejic is featured front and center on Serbian Elle’s January cover, the Telegraph reports. The cross-dressing model is fitted head to toe in Gaultier and trades in his trademark platinum locks for a choppy black wig.
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Inside the magazine, he wrestles with male and female versions of himself in a feature named “Victor Victoria.” The female Pejic wears skimpy La Perla lingerie, while a more masculine side of Pejic looks aggressive in suits.
At a twiggy 5 feet, 11 inches tall, the hipless, chestless Pejic is a fashion designer’s dream. The versatile model has hit the runway in both men’s and women’s fashion shows.
Pejic doesn’t plan on having sex reassignment surgery. Whether he identifies as male or female doesn’t seem to be the point: Gender is irrelevant.
“I’ve left my gender open to artistic interpretation,” Pejic told New York Magazine. “It’s not like ‘Okay, today I want to look like a man, or today I want to look like a woman.’ I want to look like me.”
Pejic is the second model to push gender boundaries on Elle, transforming what the fashion world considers feminine. (Brazilian model Lea T wore Givenchy on Brazilian Elle’s cover in 2011.)
In 2011, Barnes and Noble censored an issue of a magazine in which Pejic appeared bare-chested on the cover.
But Pejic is no stranger to controversy. His mother is Serbian, and his father is a Croat, which placed his parents on opposite sides of the Bosnian war in the 1990s. A few months after his birth, fighting caused his family to flee to Melbourne, Australia. He was discovered at 17 while working at McDonald’s, the BBC reports.
