Eva Wiseman in The Observer:
Casey Legler is standing, topless, by our rail of clothes, reading them like they're credits on a film. Some are “drag”, some “boy”. Some she'll wear if she wants to “serve you 'girl'”, some she won't wear at all. As a child, all she wanted to do was sit by a swimming pool in a pink tutu, and read her difficult books. She moved a lot when she was younger, between Louisiana, Florida and Aix-en-Provence, and, noticing that the fashions (and prejudices) in France and America were completely different, Legler “learned early on,” she tells me later, “that what you looked like wasn't necessarily who you were”. People had “different armour. I realised things only mean what we want them to mean, and it's not appropriate information for differentiation. What you look like is just what you look like. Then there's… everything else.”
Legler is 6ft 2in, 35 years old, and the first woman to sign exclusively as a male model. She is muscular and cheery, with the awkward swagger of a rock star. Her voice is soft and earnest, and when she talks, she holds unblinking eye contact. In front of the camera, edges appear. Spikes. She juts her chin; she becomes a boy.
Fashion has always played with gender, from 18th century men in their wigs and make-up, to Patti Smith and David Bowie, through to the recent success of Andrej Peji'c, the male model who FHM named as the 98th “sexiest woman in the world”.
More here.
