Sex: Androgynous

Antonella Arismendi

Name… Age… Height… Sex: Androgynous. Fashion, with its pioneering sense of the future and tendency towards subversion, has created a new redefinition. The imagination of fashion designers is no longer constrained by the need to design clothes strictly "for him" or "for her". They can indulge themselves and work with androgynous bodies that have the characteristics of both sexes.

Designers are now including mannish-looking girls and emaciated, decidedly girlish gentlemen in their armoury. We’ve got used by now to girls with angular chins, thin mouths and heavy eyes – but let’s start with a forerunner of this twin beauty, Kristen McMenamy.

She was born in the USA in 1964 and posed endless times for the cameras of many of the greatest photographers. Her first campaign, in 1984, was for Jil Sander and Gerard Darel and she appeared in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaarup until 2011, when she featured in i-D – she was “fixed” on the cover by Josh Olins, her face foregrounded in a play of light and shade.

But it’s only now it seems that we’ve had perfectly balanced androgyny. These slender reeds suggest what the male sex will be in the future, with facial features that are increasingly less the product of testosterone.

Andrej Pejic and Martin Cohn

This is an unconventional form of feminine beauty, one that has reached its high point with two famous young men in female-oriented outfits. These are the brown-haired (now peroxided) Martin Cohn and the blond Andrej Pejic. Cohn makes cross-dressing easy. He said that at first he was constantly annoyed by being taken for a girl, but then he learned how to laugh about it.

Between laughs, he’s appeared in V Magazine four times since 2009. He featured in Vogue Paris in 2010 and in the same year posed for Gianfranco Ferré s/s. Now he’s a party boy doing the round of the clubs, nonchalantly keeping his balance in a pair of high heels. Andrej Pejic though has been a sensation: from whatever angle you look at him, he looks like a girl.

Acclaimed by everyone as the next big thing, the only thing that seems male about the Bosnia-born Australian is his first name. With his platinum hair, small blue eyes and square jaw, the model – who’s just turned 20 – signed only last year with Storm Models, immediately attracting everyone’s attention, with endless newspapers featuring him whenever they could.