Esquire China "masculinizes" Fan Bingbing (not really)

There is nothing new about magazines using images of beautiful women in unexpected poses including dressing them as men--trying to look transgressive while still not offending anyone important. Many of us recall the "Vanity Fair" cover that featured Cindy Crawford and k.d. lang. The editors thought (or hoped) it would generate controversy among lang's country music fans although their collective response was along the lines of "it sure took those hip guys in New York a long time to figure out k.d. lang is a lesbian".

The June issue of "Esquire" magazine published in China features a number of pictures of Fan Bingbing in iconic representations made famous by men including Elvis Presley, Bruce Lee and Che Guevara. The Guevara image is on the cover and I imagine the rest of them will be popping up before long.

The Esquire image is from xinhuanet. Following the link in the lower right hand corner of the picture leads to a microblog which seems to point back to xinhuanet as the source, so the site that initially generated it remains a mystery, at least to me.