Sitting in makeup at the Standard East Village for her first Vogue.com shoot, Hari Nef, the 22-year-old transgender model and actress recently signed to IMG Worldwide, is telling us that she’s trying to hang out with Caitlyn Jenner in Los Angeles this summer. “I’m trying to get frozen yogurt with Caitlyn and just talk about girl stuff,” she says.
In a few weeks, Nef will be living in L.A. for the first time, working on a high-profile project—she can’t disclose what just yet—that’s sure to launch her further into the cultural forefront. It’s an invitation for visibility she’s happily accepted since the announcement of her signing with IMG—she’s the first transgender model on the agency’s U.S. roster, which includes Gisele Bündchen and Gigi Hadid—two weeks ago, only days after she graduated from Columbia. Almost immediately after graduating, she flew to Amsterdam to shoot a campaign for & Other Stories with an all-trans cast. Back in makeup (Nef calls the robe she’s wearing “so model-y!”), we imagine what kind of froyo Caitlyn Jenner would get: probably peach. “I was going to say peach!” Nef laughs. Maybe with coconut flakes? Strawberries? Sprinkles?
Speculating on Jenner’s palate is, of course, as arbitrary as speculating on her identity. Nef hopes that, by being open in her work, she can help others understand that there are as many ways to be trans as there are trans people. “Being a woman is an option, being trans is an option, and they’re options that appeal to me,” she says. “We need to listen to people, not labels, not semantics.”
Nef arrived wearing silver hoop earrings that stayed in for the shoot. This is the allure of working with Nef: keeping what she brings to set, including the discourse. She’s known for being outspoken and beaming a sharp enthusiasm, so much so that, as she speaks, laughs, and throws her body into gesture, one of her hoops flies out of her ears. (“There goes my hoop again!”) She bends to pick it up, slipping it back in without a pause.
For Nef, modeling began when she started transitioning, and she’s built her career while “creating, re-creating, meta-creating” herself. “I’m a different girl almost every time I look in the mirror,” she says.
Fashion can’t look away. During New York Fashion Week this season, Nef walked the runway for Eckhaus Latta, Hood By Air, and Adam Selman. She starred in Selfridges’ Agender campaign film—soundtracked by Dev Hynes and choreographed by Sia collaborator Ryan Heffington—which the London-based retailer used to launch a “gender-neutral pop-up” department this spring. Two months ago, she caught the eye of Transparent creator Jill Soloway, who took Nef as her date to a PFLAG gala, captioning an Instagram shot: “I brought an international supermodel to the #pflag gala. I heart @harinef so hard.”
But even amid all this, Nef still punctuates her Instagram bio line, “actress & model,” with “lmao.” She grew up obsessed with fashion, crouching in the international fashion magazine section in a Borders in Newton, Massachusetts, but never imagined that one day she’d be “put on blast” as a female model with a major agency. While studying theater at Columbia, she interned with casting director Jennifer Venditti, and also at VFiles in SoHo, and, at night, hosted weekly parties at the Diamond Horseshoe and Up & Down.
Nef is something of a Tumblr-age Chloë Sevigny, with dewy skin and a bone structure that supports home-cut bangs, carrying an elegant contradiction in her posture, sitting in a pretty slouch when she’s riveted, standing statuesque when she’s a little bored at a celebrity-laden party. But of course, her audience looks to her in a different way than Sevigny’s: They aren’t necessarily clamoring to be It girls; they simply want to be accepted as women, and have a say in what that means.
Tumblr users send her messages, like this one from a young transgender woman from Iraq who is “stealth”—gender-conforming—at her high school: “It’s so lonely being the only person in my town who is trans. I am so thankful that I follow you and other girls on this site . . . maybe I’m living vicariously through you a bit. You’re so brave.”
For Nef’s part, “I could have hid in Boston and lived at home for three years,” she says, “gone through my transition, taken voice lessons to make my voice more feminine, gotten gender reassignment surgery, and spent time to complete my transition before I made my debut in fashion or film, but I didn’t want to wait!” she says. “I wanted to be in the world.” Waiting would have required that she pause the rest of her life. “I’m not trying to self-aggrandize, but it’s more than a job to me,” she says. “It is political.”
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Nef is the first to say that being trans is not the most interesting thing about her, that “gender is whatever.” But as a trans woman who spends so many of her days in front of cameras, her consciousness of her gender has a more steady glow. “Insisting on perhaps a more gender ambiguous or barefaced or subtle femininity as a trans woman has opened me up to certain dangers and rejection,” she says. “There’s also confusion from cisgender folks. It’s like, ‘Girl, you should be doing everything you can to be femme. Why aren’t you? If you went a little harder for this, people really wouldn’t clock you! You could really get straight men!’ ”
Nef recently spent three hours in hair and makeup on a photo shoot, emerging with heightened contours, full-eye makeup, and long, sleek blonde extensions. When she looked in the mirror, her first thought was, “I could be married in a year if I looked like this every day,” she says. “But it just looked like a different person. It didn’t look like me.”
What looks like Hari to her? “I feel like I don’t look super feminine when I wear a lot of makeup,” she says. “You know, one of my trans girlfriends told me really early in my transition, ‘Girl, never wear lipstick on a first date. It freaks them out. You look like a tranny.’ When I don’t wear makeup, it’s not because I’m lazy, but it’s me making this radical bid for the feminization of my body and being confident in that. I don’t want to say that women who do use makeup or get breast implants or have fake nails are insecure. They’re entitled to that and they should do that if that’s what they want to do. But for me, there are no answers. It’s just a matter of preference and choice and fetish.”
At the end of the shoot, Nef floats out of the room in a J.W.Anderson cloud of tiered tulle (the model’s own). Standing in the elevator, she begins to describe real-time happenings in a faux French accent. “We ahre on zee ground fluh.” Is she referencing some highly intellectual French New Wave film? Mais non, she explains playfully: “I wish I could have the SpongeBob SquarePants narrator narrate my life!” The right to self-define, to choose your own narration, and then to change your mind is what Nef hopes her life will inspire. “It’s not enough to be cute in a magazine,” she says. “You have to talk.”
Hair: Blake Burkholder; Makeup: Akiko Owada
The post Meet Hari Nef: Model, Actress, Activist, and the First Trans Woman Signed to IMG Worldwide appeared first on Vogue.
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