When male model Andrej Pejic closed Jean-Paul Gaultier’s spring 2011 womenswear-couture show, it signaled a major shift in the business of male modeling. The 19-year-old Pejic has become the industry’s leading male-model provocateur, with gender-bending campaigns for Jean-Paul Gaultier and Steven Meisel emphasizing his asexual good looks in Italian Vogue. After years of more conservative-looking faces like Sean O’Pry and Garrett Neff Pejic makes us reconsider what a typical male model looks like.
But that new group of boys may not be as androgynous. Gene Kogan, an agent at DNA Models (the home of Castenmiller, Pejic, and Baptiste Giabiconi), feels “trends, by their very nature, are transient. And in fashion, where changes blow through seasonally, this is particularly profoundly felt. So no, I don’t think this will be lasting.” Kogan does credit Pejic with pushing the trend. “A guy like Andrej would get work and attention regardless of when he started,” he told us. “In my view, Andrej expedited this shift.” Good thing. We don’t want to stop looking at Pejic just yet.
