This week’s New York Magazine Fall Fashion 2011 issue has a major feature on Andrej Pejic. How do I know that? Because Andrej’s video w/Aussie TV moved to the top spot this afternoon. I then know something’s going on. Voila, New York Magazine.

OK, I read the whole piece, a good overview of Andrej Pejic if you haven’t followed his rise, as we have at Anne of Carversville. What can I tell you that’s new?

Writer Alix Morris digs into the depths of Andrej Pejic’s transsexual identity in a way that hasn’t been done previously. Also interesting is the observation by Morris that Andrej’s physicality actually plays into the fashion industry’s current vision of beauty.

‘I guess professionally I’ve left my gender open to artistic interpretation,’ he says. This past year, he walked in both men’s and women’s shows for Jean Paul Gaultier (who describes Pejic as an “other­worldly beauty”), and was cast as ­Gaultier’s bride—traditionally a line’s pièce de ­résistance—in his Spring 2011 couture show. For New York’s Fashion Week in February, he modeled in five shows for men and four for women. Even at men’s shows, Galliano put him in “a skimpy little singlet” and Gaultier dressed him as Betty Catroux, Yves Saint Laurent’s androgynous female muse.

(Photo: Valérie Belin. Hair by David Martinez. Makeup by Odile Subra. Clothing by Gaspard Yurkievich.)Morris comes down where I reside on Andrej’s physicality. He looks very female and while he may walk the men’s shows, he’s often on the menswear runway dressed as a woman.

Andrej has only the faintest trace of an Adam’s apple. His jawline is delicate and while he shaves his legs, he has no chest or facial hair to speak of.

What he and others like the transsexual runway model Lea T (who was in a recent Riccardo Tisci campaign for Givenchy) are doing is sidestepping the gender issue altogether by not only passing as women but even managing to be a more ideal version of the impossibly hipless and curveless women the fashion industry fetishizes. Designers can use them and feel progressive without having to actually challenge the aesthetic norm.

Note this is the current size 0, not an ounce of fat, Black Swan aesthetic, not the 90s Supermodel aesthetic. This downsizing of an idealized vision of women’s bodies, post 90s Supermodels Crawford, Campbell & Co is a core subject of discussion at Anne of Carversville.

Andrej Pejic by Armin Morbach for Tush #4We learn that Andrej calls his transsexual, gender-bending reality ‘the situation’.