Since he saw her in Euphoria, four years ago, Casey Cadwallader, creative director of Mugler, wanted Hunter Schafer (New Jersey, United States, 24 years old) to be his ambassador. She achieved it in 2021, when she starred alongside other trans women, such as Dominique Jackson (Pose), in one of her shows, and now, finally, she has become the face of the fragrance Angel, the brand’s most iconic product. “I have been interested in fashion since I was little, and I have always been interested in Mugler, his powerful and complex idea of femininity. I was to see his retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum last winter and I learned about the history of the bottle, I saw the old campaigns… and suddenly I’m here,” she says via Zoom, dressed in one of those lycra jumpsuits that Cadwallader has managed to make viral in this new stage of the brand. .
Hunter grew up learning to take advantage of fashion, “since I was little I liked to try different combinations to express myself, and in the end I ended up as a model.” In her last years of high school, she participated in a Marc Jacobs digital campaign carried out through a casting on social networks and at 18 she moved to New York. Within a year she had walked for almost all the major brands. “It was all very fast, one day I was doing a photo shoot and the next I was walking the runway, I had to learn how everything worked quickly,” she explains. Just when she was thinking of enrolling at Saint Martins to become a designer, her agency convinced her to try her luck in a test for a series in which they were looking for trans actresses: “I didn’t even know she was Euphoria. I had never considered being an actress either,” she says. But her role as Jules catapulted her to stardom. That character was created somewhat tailored to her (she in fact collaborated with the script in some chapters), but now, with several projects in perspective, including the prequel to The Hunger Games, about which he does not speak due to the writers’ strike, confesses that he has to make an effort to interpret: “The most difficult thing for me is to put myself in the shoes of the characters. I’m a little intimidated by trying to identify with what they think and feel, doing it well, it’s a kind of mental game that scares me, because I take it as something spiritual in some way, being another person and convincing being another person.”
In these three wild years, Schafer has become something of a youth icon. He has gone from posing in other people’s clothes to choosing what to wear for red carpets that the entire planet watches. And he loves it. “You have the opportunity to express different things, to dress like no one else has dressed. At first it was more difficult, because out of insecurity you want to wear, I don’t know, a t-shirt as a dress, be you, and you let yourself be carried away by the environment and end up thinking about conventional outfits. But now I see it as a tool to express myself with clothes.”
But above all it has become a generational reference, to the point of being named by the magazine time one of the 100 talents of the future; For her part, she is aware of the responsibility that entails: “People my age have to deal with many social problems and I think that on the Internet we have found an escape route. I myself have grown up looking for references and trying to be creative using the tools I found on the Internet,” she says, “but I like my generation. All that digital culture in which we move has made us give importance to things like humor or irony as a way of dealing with the world. I like that, and I like that there are no labels, that you can be creative without any type of limit or category.” She understands that they refer to her as an actress, but she is not an actress in the strict sense: “Let’s say I’m exploring. I’ve directed a video clip, I’m painting and writing… I don’t think we should pigeonhole ourselves, at least not for the moment. “I want to work with creative people to learn from, whatever kind.” Four years ago she wanted to study design, now she is not so clear: “That is exactly what I am investing my time in, seeing what I want to study. I haven’t gone to college yet, so I haven’t had to choose a path. I have tried different things and I want to try others to be clear about which career to choose. “I like acting in movies or series, but I would like to do more things, even direct movies in the future.”
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