Model Casey Legler is featured in the May issue of women’s fashion magazine Vogue.
What’s unusual: Legler is a male model.
What’s more unusual: Legler is a female male model.
We can explain.
Legler, a former French Olympic swimmer turned model, is a woman.
But her androgynous appeal led her to be the first woman to sign as a male model, posing in menswear for the prestigious New York-based Ford Models. On fordmodels.com, she’s in the “Men” category, surrounded by guys with guys’ names like Brian, Bryce, Carson and Channing. You known, Channing, as in Channing Tatum, who apparently models in addition to being Magic Mike and People’s Sexiest Man Alive.
Which, speaking of, we’re curious: Would Legler (who has reached first-name-only status on the Ford website: Casey) be eligible for this magazine honor?
At 6-feet, 2-inches, the 35-yearold Legler has cropped hair, neck tattoos, clear skin, fierce cheekbones and a gap-toothed grin (an aside: what’s up with gap-toothed being all the rage in glossy glamour mags? Sigh, if only those childhood braces and retainers hadn’t gone and ruined my high-fashion future!).
A flip through Legler’s online portfolio reveals the gal can con-vincingly rock swank guy attire - from rolled up jeans (size 32x34) and loafers to suits (she’s a 38 long), as well as the occasional girly dress. Still, she looks way more dude than “Dude (Looks Like a Lady).”
She told CNN this month that she finds male modeling effortless: “There’s so much more involved [in female modeling]. There’s the voguing … and the makeup and the whole thing.”
In this month’s Vogue, she’s modeling a vivid green $445 Raf Simons shirt (which I suppose is a man’s shirt, although the tied collar seems rather fussy and feminine). In a piece titled “Gender Agenda” about “The New Androgen,” Legler says: “I happen to be a woman - sheer luck of the biological roulette - who has the great privilege to engage the ways in which gender signifiers can be liberated.”
OK, so admittedly I’m not sure what that means. Suffice it to say that not only can women be male models, butthat models can be smart too! Wow, we’re just smashing all kinds of stereotypes today aren’t we?
File Legler under “Sometimes the best man for the job is a woman.”
And speaking of jobs, here’s hoping for her sake that male model Legler makes female wages. Modeling might be the only profession in which women make more than men.
Male, female, e-mail: [email protected] What’s in a Dame is a weekly report from the woman ’hood.
Style, Pages 29 on 04/23/2013