This Androgynous Model Posed in Victoria’s Secret Lingerie to Prove an Important Point About Beauty

Last night’s Victoria’s Secret fashion show featured a host of models touted as the world’s most beautiful women. But who decided that? One model who doesn’t fit the cookie-cutter mold decided to show that beauty goes way beyond the women on the runway.

Rain Dove, a cisgender woman whose height and facial features often get her mistaken for a man or a transgender woman, got dressed up in Victoria’s Secret lingerie and posed in a similar style to the brand’s holiday catalog. Then, she Photoshopped actual Victoria’s Secret models’ heads onto her body to show that you can create your own beauty standards, not wait around for people to see you as beautiful.

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Dove has made a career out of flipping gender norms. She originally wanted to work at the UN, but a lost bet over a football game changed everything. Because she lost, she had to show up to a Calvin Klein casting call, where, to her surprise, the director told her to come back the next day. The next day, though,  she found out she had been cast for a men’s underwear runway show, because the directors thought she was a man. Once they realized the mixup, they reluctantly let her walk the runway anyway, and it launched a career.

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But even though she’s seen some success, Dove has faced a lot of rejection in the modeling world because of her androgynous looks. “I’m constantly told in the industry that I don’t look like a woman, so therefore I can’t be put in editorials and campaigns because people wouldn’t get it,” she tells ELLE.com.” She decided to start the project to show that yes, she looks like a woman, because most women don’t look like Victoria’s Secret models.

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She shot the photos about a week and a half ago, and almost didn’t release the results. “There was a potential that these images might upset people to an extent that it could harm my career in modeling,” she says, “but I knew that the movement was more important than the career risk.”

So far, the response has been split down the middle. “Some people say there’s a reason that Victoria’s Secret wouldn’t put me or any woman who doesn’t fit within a certain spectrum on the runway,” she says. But others have come to her with their own personal stories about not fitting into specific gender norms and not feeling sexually attractive because of society’s strict beauty standards. “Even if only just a couple people hit you up, you know that it’s worth it,” she says.

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Overall, Dove wants to show that fashion is art, regardless of genders, and that the world needs to stop viewing gender and beauty as a binary system. “I just see clothing as cloth, and I see it as art, and I see it as a way to express yourself artistically in this world,” she says. Next, she’s working on a similar project highlighting gender norms in men’s fashion.