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Meet the world's first female male model

The first woman signed exclusively as a male model is a former Olympic swimmer who's finished an artist's residency in Australia. We caught up with her to discuss her body and her body of work.

Male Models: The Female of the Species
Casey Legler is a woman working as a male model. She looks wonderfully comfortable shrugging into tailored suits and chomping on cigars. But assigning words to the experience isn’t as easy

Casey Legler is a woman working as a male model. She looks wonderfully comfortable shrugging into tailored suits and chomping on cigars. But assigning words to the experience isn’t as easy. In an interview in her New York City studio, Legler steers around phrases like “gender identity” and “gender expression” in favor of having a conversation about freedom.

“I understand signifiers. We’re social creatures and we have a physical language of communicating with each other,” she says. “But it would be a really beautiful thing if we could all just wear what we wanted, without it meaning something.”

Androgyny has long been celebrated in the fashion world. Women have modeled as men, and men have modeled as women. Andrej Pejic, a young male model from Bosnia, made a splash in recent years with his feminine beauty and knack for wearing women’s clothes. (“Andrej is gorgeous,” Legler says. “In many ways, I come ushered in by that.”) But it’s still rare — if not unheard of — for a woman to sign a contract to model men’s clothing exclusively.

Legler landed the modeling gig this summer when her friend, the photographer Cass Bird, invited her at the last minute to participate in the role of a man for a photo shoot for Muse magazine. The photos were shared with an agent at Ford Models, and the next day, Legler was invited to sign a contract to work exclusively from their male roster.

“This is a unique little moment that fashion is allowing to have happen,” Legler says.

Her own relationship with fashion has always been complex. At age 13, she had already almost reached her full height (6 ft. 2 in.) and began swimming competitively in her home country of France.

“It really was just something that I happened to be good at,” Legler says. “My fantasy was always to be able to sit by the pool deck, preferably in a pink tutu, reading a book.”

When she qualified for the Olympic Games in Atlanta at age 18, Legler got together with some of her male teammates and shaved her head, eager to experience the feeling they described of swimming with a bald head.

“That was the beginning,” Legler says. “It was always one of those things: ‘These people get to do it, I really want to do it — why can’t I?’”

After the Olympics, Legler flirted with more traditional paths before coming into her own as an artist. She now works in several media, meditating on themes like time, ritual, mythology and the body. She often appears in her own pieces, using her physicality and movement as part of the work. While her entry into modeling was swift and surprising, she is eager to emphasize that becoming a male model is a natural extension of her art. It also helps that she has forged friendships in the art world, including with photographers like Bird and Ryan McGinley.

“I have a body of work. I don’t think that anyone looking at that body of work and then seeing me as a model would see it as any kind of a stretch,” Legler says. “It implies something interesting. I am not the artmaker in those cases. I get to participate with other artmakers as part of their palette.”

As for being on the men’s roster, Legler says that working as a peer with other male models has been nothing but positive. She looks forward to walking in shows in Paris in January and New York in February, and to following wherever this new role takes her.

“I wish a long and slow career for myself,” Legler says. “For everyone.”

I'm a woman who models men's clothes. But this isn't about gender

My responsibility is to kids who might feel shame – might be ostracised from society – just for being different

I am a model. I model men's clothes. The biological roulette made me female. I was the first woman to be signed to the men's board at Ford Models.

I was invited earlier this week to speak at a conference for business executives at a "trend school" – the topic: gender. I declined – not for lack of desire to share my experience, strength and hope in some helpful way. But I was rather offended by the notion of being so removed from reality as to require a school for trends, and repulsed at the blatant attempt to co-opt and commodify culture for business profit over participation and engagement with it. I also knew that there would be no room for me to break the news: this is not about gender.

So, corporate America, this article is for you.

The contemporary cultural landscape supports a larger interpretation than the one we currently have, of female-masculinity and masculine-femininity. To believe otherwise is to be deceived by a myopic view which is influenced by capitalist gain and profit.

The first thing I want to get out of the way is to ask you to look at this list: Gertrude Stein, Greta Garbo, Jenny Shimizu, Tilda Swinton, Jack Halberstam, Stella Tennant, Judith Butler, Erika Linder … it goes on. If you do not know who everyone on the list is, go look them up, your life will be larger for it. You should, after that, realise that this is not a question of "trend". There is a historical tradition you should know about and it is certainly not about gender. It is about being fierce.

The cultural context further supports this wider angled discourse on the acceptance of difference (or lack thereof) beyond the specifics of female-masculinity and masculine-feminity and posits the isolated focus on gender as incorrect. Russia, Edith Windsor and Bethann Hardison are three examples – the first being a terrifying contemporary example of institutionalised homophobia and homogeneity; the second, our own attempt here in the US to de-institutionalise homophobia via gay marriage; and the last being a fashion legend calling into question the enduring racism within fashion. The fashion industry is on its way to being the better for it.

We are only too familiar with the mainstream's difficulty in celebrating difference (when it's not being entirely destructive to it). Corporations and the traditional media have not yet learned how to resolve this: in the public discourse the celebration is often sanitised and white-washed (sometimes literally) for profit – and by this I do mean corporate profit.

And why should you care about this? Because we have in our societies children and teenagers and we are responsible for their wellbeing. This is on us. And why do I specifically care about this? Why am I bothering to write this? Because I'm gay. I'm butch. I'm a woman. I'm queer. I'm 36. I'm 6ft 2in. And caring for "otherness" matters to me. Gay youth is still terrorised for being different in some parts of the world – Russia is a horrifying example of this. But look, too, at what still happens here in the US. Children are made to feel shame, they are made to feel ugly, they are ostracised and bullied, or worse – and here in New York I see them on the streets – 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQI identified.

If images of me out there in the world make it that much easier for another kid, and the kids around them or their parents, to get on with the more important business of figuring out who they are and how they can uniquely contribute to the stream of life, then my job is done. The clincher: while unique in my contribution, I am not alone in expanding the landscape – Brittney Griner, JD Samson, Venus X, A$AP Rocky, OFWGKTA – are all examples of non-conformity and also of excellence.

This is about making space, making room and making things better. To limit this conversation to the (albeit salacious) red herring of gender is dangerous, careless and nothing short of ignorant – it takes for granted the intelligence and wellbeing of our communities (offering only an uneducated, uninteresting and sensationalist conversation to boot). It shames those who are gender-conformative and perpetuates a construct of homogeneity and belonging that is nothing short of destructive for our youth. It offers a false sense of privilege and ignorance to those who "fit" the norm (or trend) while potentially destroying those who don't and ignoring those who are able to survive outside of it.

I will not let this become just the other side to the same coin of oppression, a false emancipation at the cost of others.

This is too important and deserves closer examination and care. Lives depend on it.

Saria Dragon of the Rain Wilds, post: 1522830, member: 17429 wrote:The answer is clearly stated in both articles, and both video interviews. Forgive me for assuming that the wording of your initial question could only possibly be flamebait.

Saria Dragon of the Rain Wilds]You know wrote:anyone's[/i] "junk" is, despite that question being easily answerable in the media I posted. If you want to ask a sincere question, phrase it in a polite way. "Is Casey biologically female?" would never have drawn ire. You've admitted you have no issue with trolling, so it's a shame, but your intentions aren't going to appear innocent or respectful when you ask something decidedly provocative.

User Name, post: 1522740, member: 31164 wrote: