Andrej Pejic.
This Aussie supermodel is a man
The Australian Women’s Weekly April 2013
текст_читать дальшеBlurring the boundaries between men and women has brought Andrej Pejic international celebrity as a model, writes Caroline Overington, who talks to the 21-year-old and his mother about his career and family life.
Photograph by Liz Ham. Styling by Mattie Cronan
Ask any mother what they want for their children, they’ll probably say they want them to be happy. Drill down a little, and here is what they mean…
They’d like their children not be bullied at school. They’d like them to have friends. They’d prefer their children to choose a career that will provide them with fulfilment and not just the money. Also, ultimately, if their children fall in love, they hope that it will be with somebody who will love them right back for being exactly as they are.
“That’ my main worry when Andrej was a little boy,” says the Melbourne mum, Jadranka Pejic, of her son. “Of course I could see that he was different,” she tells the Weekly. “I was thinking, what kind of life will he have? What if people are not open-minded? Is he going to be happy, or not happy? Will the world accept him?”
Short answer? Yes, it would accept him. Indeed, in certain circles, Andrej Pejic is now the man most-wanted. He’s a supermodel, strutting catwalks in London, Paris and New York. He has posed for French Vogue and Italian Vogue. His face has appeared on towering billboards in Times Square.
He landed an international coup in March when he was chosen to appear, languid and divine, in the rock-god David Bowie’s new video. Andrej also got to kiss Bowie all of which makes sense when you understand that he has done all this - strutted and pouted and posed for a thrilled and curious audience - dressed not as a man but as a fine-boned woman.
It may not always be obvious, but Australia has a proud tradition of opening its borders to the world’s most desperate people, especially in times of war, Andrej’s famiy just one example of those who have found peace here.
Andrej was born in Bosnia in 1991. His mother, Jadranka (nee Savic) was a Bosnian Serb, his father, Vado Pejic, was Croatian. The family, which also included an older son, Igor, were Christian and solidly middle-classes.
Then came the war. “To me, it was ridiculous,” Jadranka says of the fighting that broke out in Bosnia the year that Andrej was born. “People who had been neighbours were now at war with each other. The tension between the ethnic and religious groups [Muslims and Christian, and Croatians, Bosnians and Serbs] had always been there, but it had been kept under control. Now, it was out of control.”
A panicked Jadranka decided to take her young sons - Andrej, who was not yet one, and his older brother, Igor, 18 months old - out of Bosnia.
“I was frightened,” she tells The Wekly during a reunion with her now-famous son in Melbourne. “For me, everything was about the safey of my babies. We ran away to Belgrade [in Serbia]. I left only with just two bottles of milk.”
Andrej’s father stayed behind, “hoping to protect our home, to see what could be salvaged from that life”. It was clearly a tumultous time, but Jadranka seems to have done a remarkable job of shielding Andrej from the trauma.
“I had a happy childhood,” he says, shrugging, during a pause in the delicate process of applying make-up to his equally delicate features for this story. “The refugee camp was nice. I had friend. We played together and had fun.”
Jadranka and the boys stayed in the camp for several years before moving to a village outside Belgrade. Then, when Andrej was five and Igor was six, she went back to Bosnia so they could see their father again.
“We tried to make it work, but everything was so different,” she says. “The boys did not know him. And everyone had changed.” She returned to Belgrade, but when the NATO bombing of that city began in 1999, she decided to take her sons to Australia. “I did not know Australia,” she says, “but I felt we would be safe. He [Andrej’s father] did not immediately consent, but eventually, he conceded. Their safety was everything.”
The family landed in Melbourne in 2000 “and it’s an old story - you cry for two years,” Jadranka says. “You think you have made a mistake and of nothing other than being able to home. But they must put something in the food because, after two years, you have forgotten about it.”
Jadranka used some money she’d been able to bring out from Bosnia to put a deposit on a modest house in working-class Broadmeadows (the same suburb where Eddie McGuire was raised - he’s not done too badly, either). She put her sons in local schools and did low-paid work for many years, while retraining as a secondary school teacher at a Melbourne TAFE college.
“It was not the worst situation, but it’s difficult for an educated person,” she says. “People said to me, ‘You act strange. Are you too proud to do cleaning work?’ I said, I am not too proud, but I was working as a lawyer in Bosnia and I am working as a cleaner, and there is nothing wrong with cleaning, but I have qualifications and I would like to use them.”
Jadranka was stunned to find that while she had studied boh Latin and English at school, she often could not understand her fellow Australian citizens.
“I remember somebody was talking to me about getting ‘pie’ for my work and I thought they meant an apple pie, or a meat pie,” she says laughing. “They meant ‘pay’. I was so devastated at the beginning because every conversation was like that. I knew English but I felt I could not understand it.”
She preserved and is now in demand as an emergency teacher in Melbourne’s state high schools.
“Now I take woodwork, ceramics, music, Indonesian, even Japanese,” she says, laughing.
Andrej’s passage from small, Bosnian boy to new Australian was challenging, too. He spoke not a word of English when he arrived in Broadmeadows at the age of eight. He was also quite different from the other boys in his class.
“He wanted to play with Barbie dolls and Barbie cars,” Jadranka says. “I would try to hide these things from people, but because it was my son and it made him happy I would slip his Barbie doll to him under the table and say, here, go and play with it, and bring it back to me when you are finished.”
“I put him into kick-boxing classes with his brother. Igor would go bang, bang [here, she makes a series of sharp movements with her right hand, held flat], but then Andrej would try to do the same kicks, but while flicking his hair.” A friend who was a psychologist suggested that perhaps Andrej had been mollycoddled - raised by an over-protective mother and his grandmother, Danica, in a time of war - and that he’d be somehow become more masculine over time.
“I don’t know if I believed that,” his mother says. From the earliest age, Andrej preferred to wear girls’ clothes, make-up and blow-waved his hair.
I was worried about him,” Jadranka admits. “That people wouldn’t accept him, that they would not be open-minded. I was thinking, will he be happy or not happy? What will become of him?”
The path ahead was eased when Igor and then Andrej gained entry to University High. The school is unique on the Melbourne landscape: it receives 900 applications for just 200 places every year. It’s a top 10 school, with outstanding academic results. Most importantly, however, it values the individual.
University High has students from 55 different nations. It has Goths and geeks and kids with Mohawks. Five per cent of the student population is currently from the Horn of Africa, reflecting recent patterns in the migrant intake. In the past, it has taken the Jewish refugees, the Greeks and the Italians, the working class kids from the Housing Commission flats across the road, middle-class kids from leafy Parkville and really bright kids who wouldn’t fit in anywhere else.
The school’s motto is “individuality, diversity and excellence” - all of which Andrej had in spades.
“It was a sophisticated, liberal school,” Andrej says. “They encouraged me to just be me. Nobody said I had to change. It was an artistic, cool environment.”
There was also no school uniform, meaning Andrej was never forced to conform to an arbitrary idea of what it is that boys should wear. He had long blond hair and wore eye make-up, and nobody told him that it was wrong.
“I don’t wanna make it sound like I had no problems at all,” Andrej says in his gentle voice, which rarely rises above the level of a whisper.
“I had dialogue with myself because in Serbian culture and in Australian culture… well, the way I looked was different. I thought to myself, how will I fit in? But it was remarkably easy. I looked like a girl and I dressed like a girl.”
“I wasn’t bullied, but then maybe because I looked so much like a girl, when I was waking to the railway station in Broady they just thought I was a girl!”
Like many kids in the working-class suburbs in Melbourne’s west, Andrej got his first part-time job when he was still a teenager. He was standing behind the McDonald’s counter in Swanston Street on New Years’s Eve in 2007, wearing a paper hat and preparing to ask, “Would you like fries with that?”, when Joseph Tenni of the Chadwick Models agency walked in to buy a burger.
“I flipped over him,” Joseph says (excuse the pun!) “He was already quite feminine, with shoulder-length hair, pretty eyes - even in that Maccas uniform, he was beautiful.”
He was also just 15 years old. Joseph gave him a business card, but for several months, Andrej didn’t call.
“It was because I thought it was a scam!” he tells The Weekly., “I was interested in modelling, but my brother had been involved in something like that. He’d been told he was good-looking enough to be a model and he’d ended up paying a lot of money for photographs, and it wasn’t a real agency,”
Then, one day, he Googled Chadwick Models and found out it was “one of the largest, a real agency, so I called them and they said come in”.
His first professional shoot was for the edgy Oyster magazine, which put him on the cover, “not dressed as a woman, it was more androgynous than that.” That led to some work in Sydney. ‘I remember he stayed with me and we stayed up all night watching the Eurovision Song Contest.” Joseph says. “He translated all the Serbo-Croatioan songs.”
There was probably enough interest in Andrej at that point for him to quit school and take up modelling, but his mum (and the model agency) wanted him to get his HSC, so he buckled down and made it into prestigious Monash University.
“That’s now deferred and it might take me a while to finish,” he says. “I’d like to enjoy this while it lasts” - this being the international modelling career upon which he’s since embarked.
Andrej then moved to London when he was just 18. He has since moved to New York, but such is demand for his services, he is rarely at his apartment on the Lower East Side.
“He was my son and I knew that he, at 18, was smart and self-sufficient, and humble and intelligent,” Jadranka says. “And perhaps not everyone would let every 18-year-old go to London and Paris and New York, but I trusted him and knew that he could do it.”
Joseph says the modelling world “wasn’t really sure what to do with him first”. Andrej’s first job in Paris was an editorial for Vogue “and that was androgynous. He looked like a woman - very beautiful - but wearing men’s clothes, although, of course, he was actually a man wearing men’s clothes, but looking like a woman, if that makes sense.”
Italian Vogue likewise styled him as a woman, but in women’s clothes. These days, he asked to do both. During New York Fashion Week in February, for example, Andrej modelled in five shows for menswear and four for womenswear. Two weeks later, he was in Melbourne for The Wekly, wearing both a men’s suit and, later, a lace dress that brought to mind the one that Kate Moss wore at her rock-chick wedding.
More than once, somebody - maybe everybody - on set found themselves saying, “She is so beautiful”, because the truth is, when Andrej is dressed as a woman, you completely forget that he’s a 21-year-old man.
Rumours abound that he must be taking some kind of supplement - perhaps oestrogen? - to keep the secondary male sex characteristics at bay. He says it’s not so and he says he hasn’t any plastic surgery either (no, he hasn’t had a rib removed to lengthen his torso; he hasn’t had anything injected into his face, to bring out his cheekbones; he hasn’t had his Adam’s apple shaved; he hasn’t had laser hair removal on his face - and those are just some of the rumours.)
Andrej says he is “naturally thin and I know people hate it when you say you are naturally thin, but I am.” That said, when Andrej flew into Melbourne for this shoot, his mum excitedly arranged for some of his favourite cakes to be on hand, prompting Andrej to wail, “You’re my enemy!”
Away from the catwalk, at home and out at clubs, Andrej dresses mostly in a “feminine way… I think you could say, away from work, I am more often in girls’ clothes than boys’ clothes.”
Although he has previously described himself as a “transgender model”, he tells The Weekly that he’s “young, free and unisex.” “But I don’t feel the need to describe myself in any particular terms,” he adds. And Jadranka agrees, saying, “He was always my prince and now occasionally, he is my princess, too.”
Andrej accepts that some people will be curious about his romantic life. He explains it this way, “I see myself as lucky. I don’t have the same boundaries as other people. If I feel love or passion for somebody, I can pursue it. I don’t have to be concerned about whether it’s a man or a woman.”
There are, of course, people who are outraged by the work that Andrej does on the international catwalks. They question not whether Andrej should be allowed to dress as he pleases, but how the world’s greatest designers - most of them male - can possibly justify using a man to model women’s clothes. Andrej is more than two metres tall. He is slim-hipped and wears a size 11 shoe. Why not use a real woman, one with curves, instead of angles?
Journalist Amanda Platell was appalled by Andrej’s appearance as a bride at one of Jean Paul Gaultier’s recent Paris shows. “It’s an act of abject misogyny.” she wrote in Britain’s The Daily Mail. “A bride with no breast and a lunchbox is more like the bride of Frankenstein. It’s the ultimate in woman hating to create a half-man, half-woman creature because the girls are too womanly, even when they’ve been starved to within an inch of their lives.”
Andrej’s mother answers such critics forcefully, “Of course, there are people who say this is not normal. I’m not going to say like on Gone With The Wind, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!” It took time for me to accept as well, but now I can say, “Frankly, I don’t care much what you think.”
“He is my son and I love him, and the important thing is he’s happy and, for a mother, that matters.”
Andrej is a little more circumspect. “I like to work without boundaries,” he says. “I am as happy to model menswear as I am to model womenswear. I have done both. I have said this before - I like to leave my gender open to artistic interpretation. And I don’t think, “I’m this person or I’m that person’. I’m just me.”
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