A 20-year-old man from Russia’s Sakhalin Oblast region recently made national headlines after being declared the winner of a women’s lingerie photo contest organized by a popular store chain.

Andrey Nagorny, a resident of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, heard of the online photo contest through his girlfriend. Aware of his feminine features, they decided to take a few photos of Andrey wearing some sexy women’s lingerie and enter them into the contest, just for fun. Andrey’s girlfriend, whose name has not been made public, fixed his hair and did his makeup before asking a talented photographer to snap some rather professional-looking photos of him and submitting them to the contest organizer online. They expected to get a good laugh out of the whole thing, but what they didn’t expect was for Andrey to be declared the winner.

Photo: Andrey Nagorny/Instagram

The lingerie store originally declared 20-year-old Andrey Nagorny the winner of their photo contest, and awarded him the title of “Miss Avocado”. But that was before they contacted him to schedule a professional photo shoot and learned that he was actually a man. Afraid of how the public – particularly their customers – would react to a man being celebrated for wearing women’s lingerie, they decided to disqualify him and hand the title over to the first runner up.

“The boy looks very similar to a girl, and since anyone could enter our contest, he chose to participate as well. We got his photos, and in the end the jury chose him as the winner, he was selected,” Zheanna Stolpovskaya, manager of the lingerie store chain that organized the photo contest, told 360TV. “For the final photo shoot, we chose three girls, he didn’t participate, because the photos will be available for everyone to see. Obviously, we couldn’t predict how the general public and our buyers would react to them.”

Photo: Andrey Nagorny/Instagram

Basically, the guy won, but when the organizers learned that the person in the photos wasn’t a woman, they decided that he couldn’t be the winner. Andrey Nagorny apparently didn’t even win a consolation prize, but he says that he’s not disappointed at all, because he never expected to win in the first place.

As for the reaction of the public to the organizer’s decision to disqualify Andrey, it wasn’t exactly what they expected.

Photo: Andrey Nagorny/Instagram

“Idiots! Now he can easily sue them for gender discrimination. And you thought that only women are discriminated against?” one person wrote on Russian social media.

“They are so full of s*hit! Why didn’t they announce gender requirements from the very start? Or give the first prize to the owner of the lingerie store chain?” another commented.

Photo: Andrey Nagorny/Instagram

Guess their decision backfired…

But, controversy aside, Andrey Nagorny‘s win was pretty impressive. If he so wishes, he could probably become a successful androgynous fashion model, like his countryman, supermodel Stanyslas Fedyanin, or Serbian sensation Andrej Pejic.

Photo: Andrey Nagorny/Instagram

Andrey told 360TV that even without makeup and women’s clothing he often gets mistaken for a woman, but he has gotten used to it, and his friends don’t tease him too much about it.

Check out more of Andrey Nagorny’s artistic photos and amazing transformations, check out his Instagram account