Androgyny in high fashion

Do androgynous models challenge or reinforce the gender binary?

In recent years, the world of high fashion has expressed a penchant towards androgynous models and has subsequently received critical applause for blurring the rigid hegemonic gender binary. The catwalk and fashion advertisements are constructed as a place where gender plays out through heavy styling and make-up. Normative ideals of gendered behaviour are temporarily suspended. Models Andrej Pejic and Freja Beha Erichsen have emerged as the exemplars of androgyny in fashion, negating prescribed gender roles. Freja’s “enigmatic boy/girl look—the antithesis to the equally current all-woman ideal” allows her to occupy a ‘masculine’ role in advertisements and don menswear inspired looks on the catwalk while Andrej’s “extreme androgyny” grants his agency to post him “not just on the men’s board but also on the women’s.” Like feminist Judith Butler’s “men in drag as women,” androgynous models on the catwalk lead to a “destabilisation of gender itself” by questioning its naturalness. While the malleable physicality of the androgynous model appears subversive, some argue it reinforces the existing gender binary: Freja and Andrej’s ability to perform both genders or occupy the space in between respectively relies on her “boyish” and his “feminine” features.

Appearing on the catwalk as “Gaultier’s bride”, traditionally a line’s pièce de résistance, Andrej Pejic regularly deconstructs the normative bounds of the masculine gender. The transition from masculine to feminine fashion arenas requires a change from movements that are simpler to more fluid and dramatic strides, recognising the catwalk as a space where Pejic’s gender reveals, indeed, explicitly performs, its own constructed-ness. In his essay titled “Second Skins; The Body Narratives of Transsexuality”, Jay Prosser, cites the function of “queer transgender” as “figure, dramatising or metaphorising the workings of heterosexuality’s construction”.

A parallel can be drawn between the manner in which “drag “exposes or allegorises” the process by which heterosexual genders form themselves.” Pejic’s ability to transform himself in a matter of moments into the “most beautiful woman” (New York Magazine) is a demonstration. The fashion industry’s resistance to place Pejic in one particular box by casting him as either “a beautiful boy or a girl” (NYM) allows him to operate at the margins of the gender binary. Bulter puts Andrej’s success in the male and female fashion industry due to society’s failure to read his physical gender. His refusal to consider sex change lets him retain his ability to function as a ‘chameleon’ between masculinity and femininity. Butler suggests, “In imitating gender, drag” or in this case, modelling, “implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency.” This means society is unable to caste Pejic’s body within the gender binary. Pejic calls the resulting confusion as “the situation”, which subverts the notion that gender is tied to the material body, and links it to “various acts of gender create the idea of gender… without those acts, there would be no gender at all.”

Unlike Pejic, Freja Beha Erichsen elicits no curiosity around her gender and is labelled as a “beautifully androgynous” female model displaying “tough boyishness”. Playing on her tomboyish attitude and look, the fashion industry often casts Freja in tailored menswear inspired looks. In a recent fashion show for Chanel, Freja appeared alongside male model Baptiste Giabiconi, in an identical outfit, casting them as mirror images of each other and allowing her to serve as heterosexual gender’s subversive foil. The calculated aesthetic choice of clothing them in matching outfits, styling their appearance in a similar manner and coordinating their ascendance down the runway allow “the drag’s imitated workings [to] parallel the imitative workings that structure straight genders.”

Another much venerated moment in her career was when Freja appeared as Greek God, Apollo, in the 2011 Pirelli Calendar, with a phallic metal object covering her genitals and her flat, seemingly masculine, chest exposed. Her portrayal of an emblem of phallic masculinity requires her to suspend her individual, female identity and operate as a ‘total chameleon’. The phallic object covering her femininity does not conceal her essence but emerges as that which masquerades as this essence; the mask itself constitutes gender. The photograph questions the naturalness of identity, and by extension gender, as it recreates Freja as a mythical character with no historical origin, while upholding that gender. Transitioning between “boyishness” and “sultry” femininity on the catwalk, Freja displaces herself from a singular gender identity, exemplifying Bulter’s point that “gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is only real to the extent that it is performed”.

While Andrej and Freja repeatedly perform different gender identities and challenge normative understandings of their respective genders, their performances also reproduce and reinstate stereotypical characterisations of gender. Andrej’s success on the catwalk alongside female models heavily relies on his ‘naturally’ delicate physical appearance – “He has only the faintest trace of an Adam’s apple” and “has no chest or facial hair to speak of”. The misreading of Andrej’s physical body and the fact that most strangers who encounter Pejic do not seem to doubt that he is a woman functions to validate his placement in women’s wear runway shows.

The make-up and styling used to prepare him for the catwalk effectively erase his androgyny by enhancing his feminine features to allow him to walk alongside ‘real’ female models. Bulter insists that “realness” is a standard used to judge any given performance. Thus covering by Freja’s vagina with a phallic object, the material lack of a penis is substituted by an artificial object, and parallels the use of an androgynous (read: artificial) female in place of a male model. Both models are required to prescribe to the normative ideals of their “adopted” gender. Despite recognition as an androgynous figure, Pejic “has to lose weight” to prepare for women’s wear shows because as narrow as his frame already is, he still has the bone structure of a man. This compulsion to re-shape his body to match the female models does not allow the ambivalence of identity which androgyny produces to manifest itself. Here androgyny itself emerges as a product of the model’s inherent physicality that puts them closer to their performed gender.

While one can argue that Andrej and Freja’s androgynous performances resist the gender division, their actual performance also stabilizes “gender, and, by extension, the female body as fixed. As a model on the catwalk, the chameleon-like Pejic must emerge as a replica of a glamorized feminine figure in a presentation where the masculine element of his identity is visibly reduced, if not effectively erased. The push towards binary classification is further highlighted by the fact that while Pejic says he resists a “sort of strong gender identity—I identify as what I am” yet he is constantly pressured to defend himself—“to sit here and be like, ‘I’m a boy, but I wear make-up sometimes.’ But you know to me it doesn’t really matter.”

What gets dropped from androgynous public performance, as Prosser suggests, is that off the catwalk, both Freja and Andrej, seek very pointedly to be non-performative, “quite simply, to be.” The androgynous model in fashion simultaneously subverts and reiterates cultural notions of gender identity. The performance is ironic: the “most beautiful woman” is ‘actually’ a man who walks down a women’s runway as a “more ideal version” of womanhood.

While the media continues to present the androgynous model as something subversive, it is crucial to observe that the model’s figure is controlled to reiterate normative conceptions of gender. The reliance on Andrej’s ‘frail’ physicality to validate his use in women’s wear shows and replacing Freja’s lack of penis with phallic object, exemplifies that androgynous models still operate within the umbrella of binary gender.

The writer is a staff member of Pakistan Today and holds a degree from Mount Holyoke College.