Is Andrej Pejic about to sign a fragrance deal?

jean paul gaultier FW1213/getty via daylife

Frockwriter was interested to watch the following story on Andrej Pejic which aired overnight on Sept à Huit on France’s TF1 Channel. The story followed Pejic in fittings and rehearsals for Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fall/Winter 2012/2013 menswear show last week (above) and Friday’s Michalksy womenswear show at Berlin Fashion Week. During one scene filmed inside his Paris agency, New Madison, a booker revealed that he has been booked for this week’s haute couture shows. One specific haute couture show is possibly a safe bet: Jean Paul Gaultier’s show on Wednesday. This time last year, Pejic famously closed Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2011 haute couture show in a wedding gown. In signing off, the Sept à Huit anchor dropped another tantalising morsel of Pejic gossip in his voice-over: “He will sign, in several weeks, his first contract to lend his image to a major perfume brand”. UPDATE 23/02: Sources say the contract is for Jean Paul Gaultier's new menswear fragrance Kokorico. UPDATE 21/03: Now confirmed by Gaultier. 

Note that the wording is “he will sign”, instead of he has already signed. One of the reasons, frockwriter assumes, Pejic’s mother agency, Chadwick in Sydney, was reluctant to comment or even speculate.

Could this mooted fragrance contract possibly be with Jean Paul Gaultier?

Pejic and the so-called bad boy of French fashion now seem joined at the hip. Beyond last year's couture coup and one JPG ready-to-wear womenswear show, Pejic has now walked in four consecutive JPG menswear shows (in the James Blond FW1112 show, walking out dressed as both a man and a woman) and has in fact already appeared in one of the designer's advertising campaigns: the Spring/Summer 2011 womenswear campaign, with Karolina Kurkova. 

It’s only a matter of time, surely, before Pejic hits the big time in terms of commercial contracts. Such is his unique point of difference in the fashion business - an unparalleled ability to model both menswear and womenswear, without descending into travesty - seemingly every time he booked a job over the past twelve months, global headlines rolled out. If one was to count the 'advertising value equivalency' of all this publicity, it would rate in the millions of dollars for the Andrej Pejic brand. Quite possibly, tens of millions of dollars.

Last year Pejic appeared on 14 magazine covers, more than any other Australian model. And while many of the latter were small, independent publications, the February cover of Canada’s Fashion magazine - on which Pejic appears in a womens’ cocktail dress, with the cover line “Andrej Pejic – model of the moment” - would seem to be new territory. That’s a mainstream womens’ fashion magazine. Ditto the bra campaign for Dutch discount department store Hema in December, which was described by Pejic's mother agent Joseph Tenni at the time as “a money job”.