As Rio Gains Fashion Cred, Transgender Models Might Get Lost in the Shuffle

As part of its Fashion Week Internationale series, Vice has made a documentary that explores the various tensions that currently surround race, gender and body type in Rio de Janeiro’s burgeoning fashion industry. As the city sits poised like an extremely fashionable ocelot to become the fifth of the preeminent fashion metropolises, pressure to conform to a more global ideal of beauty could threaten transgender women such as model Leah T who’ve carved out a pretty large space for themselves in the industry.

According to the documentary’s host Charlet Duboc, tolerance for transgender women in Brazil is particularly remarkable in the fashion industry, where Leah T achieved prominence last year by kissing Kate Moss on the cover of LOVE. However, with the Olympics looming and more international attention being drawn to Rio as a fashion hotspot, Duboc supposes that, in an effort to fall more in line with the rest of the world, Brazil may abandon its inclusion of transgender models.