New Male Model is Actually Female

I thought this was a pretty interesting story about a woman modeling as a man. Even though Casey isn’t the first woman to model as a man, she is the first to exclusively model in menswear. I do wonder how this makes transgender people feel. I don’t know if this is some sort of acceptance in the world for people who feel they are a different gender, but maybe this is a start. Maybe I’m just looking at a positive in this story and hoping that the fashion world isn’t just doing this for pure shock value. CASEY Legler isn’t your typical catwalk model. She’s just signed a contract with one of the world’s most prestigious modelling agencies and will appear in shows in Paris and New York. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but look at her contract and you’ll see the twist: she’ll be modelling men’s fashion. Legler is the first woman to work exclusively as a male model, and her unlikely career is as much as a surprise to her as it is to fashion watchers. It began when a photographer friend asked her to model some men’s clothing for magazine shoot. The 35-year-old artist told TIME magazine her friend said: “You’re perfect for this. Are you in?” She was: “I wasn’t doing anything on that particular Friday, and so I said yes!” The next day the photos were shared with an agent at Ford models, and Legler was signed immediately. Legler’s boyish physique, her short quaffed hair and chiseled cheekbones lend themselves to men’s fashion. “Is it a stretch for me to get styled wearing men’s clothes? Anyone can look at me for two seconds and know that that part is not so complicated,” she told TIME. “I think the part that can feel complicated sometimes is that I also look really fierce in a dress, and I’ve been taught by the best queens how to rock some heels!” Legler follows in the footsteps of Andrej Pejic, the Bosnian-born, Australian-raised male model who has enjoyed huge success modelling women’s fashion. “Andrej is gorgeous,” she said. “In many ways, I come ushered in by that.” She says that androgyny is the way forward in fashion. “We have very specific ways in which we identify ourselves as man or woman and I think that sometimes those can be limiting. “Seeing me on the men’s board… speaks to the notion of freedom, you know. There’s something really bold about that, and that it really is saying look, there is also this other way, and it’s really rad.”