Lea T.'s Runway Revolution
Brazil's hottest new model is tall, dark, and glamorous. She's also a he. Meet high fashion's newest gender-bending muse.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/06/12/transgendered-model-lea-t-s-runway-revolution.html (http://www.newsweek.com/2011/06/12/transgendered-model-lea-t-s-runway-revolution.html)
In a snakeskin monokini and pink denim hotpants, Lea T. emerges from a faux tropical portico and saunters into the bright lights. This is Fashion Rio, Latin America's signature fashion event for summerwear, and for weeks now the buzz has been building to just this moment. All night, sylphs in beach gear have walked the fashion planks, but they might as well be teasers for Lea. A dozen steps later, with a practiced pout and a hip-check salute to the camera pit at the end of the runway, the 29-year-old model with a dragon tattoo on her pelvis owns the crowd. As the bleachers erupt in wolf whistles, who'd have figured that the hottest new face from Brazil is not a she at all?
Brazilian beauties are hardly strangers to the world of high style, but never mind Gisele and the Girl From Ipanema. The new sensation of the runways is Lea T., a transgender model who fell into the trade almost by accident and has been making outsize waves ever since.