She might have been joking when she said her ultimate goal was "world peace," but androgynous and agender model Rain Dove does hope to use her burgeoning modeling career to support her activism.
During her interview with Windy City Times, Dove was in the midst of a photo shoot in San Diego for Dapper Boi, a clothing company making clothing for androgynous women.
"I really hope that my career is long-lasting," Dove said. "I hope I'm able to acquire the amount of revenue I need to be able to invest in individual companies, like Dapper Boi, which is making more of what they would consider physiologically neutral clothing. I'm hoping to invest in small businesses like that so we can see more diversity in the physiology of our clothing and stores."
Dove was also planning to spend her "downtime" in San Diego volunteering at several nonprofits, including the city's LGBT center, Clean San Diego and Feeding America.
"I have a blog about being more than a model, being more of a movement towards creating positive change," she said. "The goal is to show the potential of one human life and what happens when we stop being a selfie nation and start being more of a selfless nation."
Dove said her passion for bettering the human plight began before she was even 10 years old.
"I went on a trip to Honduras when I was young and saw how people were living in these tiny mud huts and people were sifting through trash in order to be able to find resources for themselves and yet they were so kind to each other," she said. "I came back home and ever since then I just wished the world would be happier with less."
Dove never intended to become a model, instead, she said she was hoping to score a job with the United Nations doing work in the area of water rights, but a night out with a friend watching a football game changed her path.
"I was having a bad day and we went out for drinks and we were watching the football game and she told me I should model and I told her models are pretentious people who don't eat," Dove said. "She said 'you could do a lot of good stuff with it' and we came up with a bet that if I picked the losing team I would have to go to a casting call and if she picked the losing team she would have to endorse the film collective I was running at the time."
Dove lost the bet and three months later she was at a casting call for Calvin Klein.
By mistake she was hired for the men's show instead of the women's.
"They found out the day of the show that I was a female and let me walk anyway," she said.
Word got around that Dove was a female walking in a men's show and she said it helped her career take off.
"Once I walked in one Calvin Klein show then a lot of people wanted to work with me, but I only took paying work and I took it as male or female, I didn't really care. If it paid me I'd take it."
Dove said she prefers being able to do both male and female work, as it represents a fuller picture of her as a human being.
"I think its ridiculous that the clothing world is divided into two," she said. "I'm not trying to be a gimmick, I'm trying to live my life and photography just documents the styles that a human being could potentially portray or indulge."
Dove said she found out quickly that the fashion world wasn't exactly how she'd pegged it, and that her friend had been right about being able to use her career to make a difference.
"My idea of fashion has completely changed, there are bad elements that do exist, but I think fashion is a lot more diverse than we give it credit for," she said.
As one of the largest and most influential industries in the world, Dove said fashion really has a lot of potential for positive impact.
"Fashion has an opportunity through advertising to change the world and I've seen that possibility and it makes me excited to be in the fashion industry," she said. "We have to get the advertising agencies on board, because fashion isn't limiting it's the advertisers who are afraid they aren't going to make any money."
Dove has hope that the changing sociopolitical landscape in the United States will lead to a greater diversity in advertising.
She also noted with so much competition companies might need to look more closely at how to market to a more diverse customer base.
"As the market becomes more saturated with more and more clothing lines looking to compete for support through customers you are going to find they are going to try and reach out to a more diverse and broader range of people so they can get someone to buy their clothing," she said.
Dove continues to build her modeling career, she has New York Fashion Week coming up and appeared earlier this summer in the first men's New York Fashion Week.
Additionally, she said she hopes to do more acting, noting television could use some gender-neutral actors.
She is also planning the "It" project, which is a blog series where she will call on people to try and get rid of gendered pronouns for a day and instead use "it" in their place.
"Instead of calling someone he or she they just call you it and see how it feels," she said. "You will realize how much we really objectify each other through pronouns and how much they have a meaning."
There is also the Dapper Boi campaign, which Dove was in the process of shooting at the time of the interview.
"We are doing a photo shoot called 'I'm not a boy,' and they have a t-shirt that says 'I'm not a boy' and I'm shooting alongside people who have different perceived sexual expressions wearing the shirt. Its almost like if we had to warn people about ourselves; it's a little sarcastic."
Dove said ultimately her goal is to "normalize the idea that everybody is different."
"My goal in my career is to inspire all humans to live their life individually and uniquely and to pursue the things that they love, the people they love and the things they love to do without apologizing," she said.
