The sky is a stone washed blue, the sun scorching, and the waves are pounding on the shore as Gisele Bündchen makes her way out onto the jagged rocks of an old jetty off Georgica Beach, in the Hamptons. Though she’s barefoot, she walks with an extraordinary grace that’s all the more remarkable considering what she’s wearing—a taupe corset by the designer Maggie Norris, tied suffocatingly tight, and a massive, floor-length bouffant skirt by John Galliano. It’s a spectacular confection, worthy of Marie Antoinette, and so heavy that the models who wore it at Galliano’s last Paris show had to be hoisted onto the runway. But Gisele—who, after all, is not just any model—needs no help. Balancing herself on a rock, the spray of the waves framing her, the wind blowing her magnificent long golden-brown hair, she throws back her head and laughs. She turns to the camera. She pouts. For 20 minutes she poses and vamps as a crowd of onlookers stare in astonishment. Then, with a cue from the photographer, Patrick Demarchelier, she turns around and picks her way back among the rocks and up the beach.
“Fabulous!,” “Gorgeous!,” “Amazing!,” the swarm of makeup artists and fashion assistants gush as she enters the tent that serves as her dressing room. It’s what Gisele Bündchen has been hearing almost from the moment she took her first stiletto-heeled step on the international catwalks, nearly seven years ago. Today she’s nothing less than fashion’s reigning supermodel and the woman Rolling Stone called “the most beautiful girl in the world,” but right now, as she is helped out of the 20-pound Galliano skirt, she laughs at the buzz of compliments. “Oh, please,” she says in her velvety Brazilian accent. “Look at me! I’m so sweaty—I’m disgusting.” She turns to the gaggle of little girls, daughters of the crew, who have been following her adoringly throughout the day’s photo shoot and rolls her eyes. “Let me tell you,” she says, “being a model is not so glamorous as you think. Sometimes you stand around in little clothes in the freezing weather, in Iceland. Sometimes you burn up for hours in the sun on the beach. It is a good job, but it’s just a job. You listen to Gisele on that one, O.K.?”
Just when models had gotten so empty-eyed and emaciated that no woman could imagine looking like them without the benefit of intravenous drugs, along came Gisele. Tan and healthy, she breathed life into the fashion world and brought curves and muscles back into style. At 24, Gisele is the most sought-after model in the business, heir to high-80s supers such as Linda Evangelista and Cindy Crawford, and as a result she’s fantastically rich, with rumored earnings of $5 million a year—which doesn’t include the millions she gets from endorsement contracts with Victoria’s Secret and Valentino, to name only two. But in an industry that breeds divas, Gisele is an anomaly. “Easy to work with, no attitude” is how one fashion producer describes her. She travels without an entourage or assistants. She shows up at photo shoots alone, accompanied only by Vida, her teacup Yorkshire terrier, whom she calls “my baby, my partner in life.”
No, she’s not neurotic or difficult, but she is serious. Very serious—as the phenomenal success of Ipanema, her line of flip-flops, demonstrates. She chose to design and sell flip-flops because she wanted her product to be something that nearly everyone in Brazil, with its endemic unemployment and poverty, could afford, and they have become one of the biggest-selling shoes in the country, with more than $30 million in sales since 2001. Other models also have licensing arrangements—Iman, for example, has a hugely successful makeup line, and Elle Macpherson designs lingerie—but, for Gisele, business is not just a sideline; it’s the direction in which she wants to take her career.
Forget the glamorous parties, the exotic locations, the billboards and magazine covers. Whatever happens, she says, she is planning to leave modeling after “another two years, maximum.” She goes on, “I would never want to be one of those girls who is 30, and modeling is all they know how to do. I want to do my best, and then I want to close the chapter on this job so I can look back and say this is what I did from 14 to 26, and then have another chapter. Some people start modeling because they want to be models and they want the parties and the recognition, and then there are people like me. I come from a simple family, and for me getting into modeling was a chance to make money and create a business.”
As part of that plan, Gisele is hoping to extend her brand to Hollywood. This month, she makes her feature-film debut in Taxi, a remake of the French comedy by Luc Besson. Yes, Leonardo DiCaprio is her boyfriend of five years (we’ll get to that later), but he had nothing to do with getting her the part as a clever bank robber on the run from a bumbling cop, played by Jimmy Fallon, and Queen Latifah as a wisecracking cabbie. “I must admit that I didn’t know what to expect, because she had never acted before,” says the director, Tim Story. “But she walked into the room and blew me away.” Story says he was looking for “a fireball who could hold her own with Queen Latifah,” and he was amazed at how totally Gisele inhabited the part. She even insisted on driving a stunt car in a couple of chase scenes. “She’s wild*,*” says Story. “We had to make the person in back of her keep up because we didn’t realize she’d drive so fast.”
Already, Gisele’s performance is sparking talk in Hollywood that she could be the next Bond girl, but that doesn’t mean she’s ready to call herself an actress: “I read the script a month before I got there, and I was saying, ‘Should I do it or should I not?’ I worried . . . would people say, ‘Oh, another model trying to be an actress’? I had a blast, but if people don’t like me in the movie, I will not do it again. I will not make people suffer or pay their money to see me.”
Early on a summer morning—two days after her walk on the jetty—Gisele is sitting in the garden of a quiet café in Greenwich Village that has become one of her favorite hangouts, in part because the paparazzi have not yet followed her here. As the waiter approaches, she flashes her trademark wall-to-wall smile. “Scrambled eggs, please. Bacon. Toast, with butter, and a cappuccino,” she says, and then turns to me and shrugs. “I like to eat.” She is wearing blue jeans and a green-and-white striped tank top; her only adornment is one small diamond hoop earring. Seeing Gisele without makeup, you realize what a natural beauty she is—her dark freckled skin, deep-blue eyes, and flyaway cheekbones are as arresting in person as they are on film. She’s fun too, and full of explosive energy, a loud-laughing girl who talks at 90 m.p.h. and gesticulates like . . . well, like a Brazilian.
“I am not engaged, and I was never engaged. I do not understand why everyone wants to marry me [off].”
Gisele’s father, Valdir, and mother, Vania, still live in Horizontina, an agricultural town in southern Brazil where she grew up along with her five sisters—Raquel, Graziela, Gabriela, Rafaela, and Gisele’s twin, Patricia. Gisele’s parents weren’t poor—her father, she says, owned a construction business, and her mother was a bank teller—but, with six children, money was tight. “We shared everything. I never had new clothes,” she remembers. “From the time I was very young, I was thinking about financial security.” A community so small that it has no traffic light and not a single restaurant, Horizontina was not the sort of place where girls grew up dreaming of being supermodels. An A student, Gisele wanted to be a professional volleyball player and was so good that she might well have become one if it hadn’t been for the modeling course that someone in Horizontina threw together for the town’s girls. No one, Gisele recalls, was interested in the modeling, but the trip to São Paulo that was promised at the end of the class was irresistible. Gisele was 13 and had never been to a big city, let alone São Paulo, which is a 25-hour bus ride from Horizontina, and she was thrilled. Shopping in a real mall and going to the amusement park “was amazing,” she says, as was eating her first meal at McDonald’s, where a modeling agent saw her among the 55 black-uniformed girls, chaperoned by their mothers, and asked her if she wanted to be a model. “I had never seen fashion magazines,” she says with a laugh, “and I told my mom I didn’t want to be a model, and my mom wasn’t sure, either.”
Months went by before Vania Bündchen allowed her daughter to attend her first modeling contest, held in a nearby town where Gisele was playing volleyball. An Elite modeling agent had told Gisele that she would be there only to watch, but when she got there, “wearing my volleyball outfit,” she realized that the agent had enrolled her. He handed her a black dress and instructed her to walk down the runway. As it turned out, she was one of five contestants selected to move to São Paulo to model full-time. “My mom was really cool about the whole thing,” says Gisele. “My dad hated it. He was like, ‘No, my daughter is not going to be a model. Everyone says they are a model, and they are just prostitutes and sluts.’ My father was never for it. But then I showed him my first magazine photo, and he realized I was not that kind of model.” (Maybe it’s because of Valdir that Gisele has always refused to appear with her breasts fully exposed—which, naturally, has only fueled speculation that they might be surgically enhanced. She insists, however, that they’re the real thing.)
An unabashed daddy’s girl, Gisele is proof that behind most strong, smart girls there’s a doting father. She calls her father “my best friend” and “the best man in the world.” Her whole life, she says, “my dad always said, ‘The women are always right,’” and one gets the sense that if it hadn’t been for him she might not have stuck it out through the first tough years. Gisele was just 14 when she arrived alone by bus in São Paulo in January 1995. She was immediately robbed of all her cash and stood on the street crying until someone gave her enough change to call her father, who arranged for help.
During the next couple of years, about the only work she could get was for catalogues, primarily in Japan, because no one—now wrap your mind around this—thought she was pretty enough. “Clients would call from the casting and say, ‘Her eyes are too small, her nose is too big.’ People said, ‘She can never make it,’ and my agent would tell me that, too—in a subtle way, but I’m not stupid. I knew what they were saying. But I kept trying. I was not going to go home empty-handed,” she says. “But I was hurt and I told my dad, and he said, ‘Gisele, ignore them. People with big noses have big personalities. Little noses mean little personalities.’ And that was it. I didn’t mind it anymore. I said, ‘I am not going to listen to people who make me feel bad.’ I mean, modeling is a superficial business. Beauty is superficial. If it’s real, it comes from inside.”
In those early days, Gisele lived in an apartment in São Paulo with several older models. “They were always partying,” she says, while Gisele was going to school and working weekends. They also gave her an early introduction to the often cutthroat competition among models, which again her dad told her to ignore. “If you think you are better than someone else,” he said, “you’re nothing.”
Among the many things Gisele says she has learned from modeling are three languages—Italian, Spanish, and English, all of which she now speaks fluently. But when she arrived in New York, in 1996, she spoke only Portuguese and a few words of English. She remembers wandering from casting call to casting call, “saying yes to everything because I didn’t understand but didn’t want to seem stupid.” And although she got some work, it was mostly on the runway. “People didn’t think I was pretty enough to take pictures of, but they thought I was a good walker,” Gisele says, rolling her eyes. Indeed, Patrick Demarchelier remembers being dazzled the first time he saw her, sometime in 1997, but finding no takers for his pictures of her. “She was so different, so healthy,” he says. “At the time the models were all edgy, with the look like drug addicts, and no one was interested in Gisele. And then eight months later everyone wanted Gisele.”
Her big break came in 1997, when Gisele flew to London, auditioned for 42 runway shows, and was selected for 2, including Alexander McQueen’s, which was the hottest show of the season. From there it was on to Milan, where she caused a sensation on the Dolce & Gabbana and Versace catwalks. French Vogue was the first to put her on its cover, but one magazine after another quickly followed suit. Then came advertising campaigns for Dior, Balenciaga, Givenchy, and Ralph Lauren. In 1999, Gisele was named Model of the Year at the VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards, and in 2000 she co-hosted the ceremony. By then, Gisele had become so wealthy that she could turn down work, and the first thing to go was walking the runways, which she gave up after signing a five-year contract with Victoria’s Secret. Modeling underwear—even if it is alligator thongs and pearl-studded bras—was a “tough choice,” she says, but in the end she went for it “because it gave me the financial freedom.” (She won’t discuss her contract’s terms except to say, with a huge grin, “It’s big.”)
Over the years, Gisele has mostly managed to avoid the kind of bad press that afflicted her supermodel predecessors. (Who can forget Linda Evangelista’s monumen-tally spoiled remark, “I don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000,” or Naomi Campbell’s pre-anger-management rampages?) Gisele has been bad-mouthed in public only once, in 1999, when she left the ailing Elite agency for I.M.G. Furious at her departure, Elite’s founder, John Casablancas, unleashed a stream of invective at supermodels in general and at Gisele in particular, calling her a “monster of selfishness.” Gisele shrugs it off. “I wasn’t happy there. It was very messy, and it wasn’t the way I like to work, because I like everything in order. I wanted some stability, and they didn’t give it to me.” It’s important, Gisele says, “for me to work with people that I trust,” who “don’t think of me as a moneymaking machine.”
The other controversial moment in her career, however, is one Gisele deeply regrets. It happened almost two years ago, when she became the target of anti-fur activists angered by her appearance in an ad for Blackglama mink. As she walked down the runway during a Victoria’s Secret lingerie show at the Lexington Avenue Armory, in New York, four members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals mounted the catwalk and surrounded her, waving signs that read, GISELE: FUR SCUM, before being hauled away by security guards. As the celebrity-studded audience looked on in horror, Gisele maintained her cool and continued walking down the runway, but she remembers being terrified. “I thought they were going to hurt me,”she says. “I didn’t know what was going on.” When she found out, she was extremely upset and sent PETA a letter of apology. She says she hadn’t even thought of the fur issue when she did the ad, having been drawn instead by the long line of famous actresses who had been featured in Blackglama’s “What Becomes a Legend Most?” campaign. “It was a bad decision on my part, because I don’t wear fur,” she says, “and I understand their cause. I am the biggest animal-lover in the world. I have four dogs and two horses, and I have rescued animals all my life. I did a whole special for I.F.A.W. [the International Fund for Animal Welfare] for the Russian bear, because they go and kill the cubs when the mothers are in the cages. Leonardo did it for the whales, and I did it for the bears.”
Ah, yes, Leonardo. So is it true what the gossip columns have been saying for months now, that they’re engaged? “No, I am not engaged and I was never engaged,” she says, laughing. “I do not understand why everyone wants to marry me [off]. Does everyone want to get rid of me so fast? I am only 24.” The rumors started, she believes, when they were spotted shopping together at a jewelry store. “Because of the paparazzi, we try almost never to go out in public together,” and that shopping trip, she now says, was “a big mistake.” The paparazzi trail them everywhere—even to the Andes in Peru. According to one report, the couple reached the top of a mountain near the ruins of Machu Picchu last year only to find a battery of photographers waiting for them.
These days, it seems their relationship has recovered from the bad patch of two years ago, when tabloids reported that they had broken up and even suggested, if it can be imagined, that DiCaprio had strayed. It was, Gisele says, “the hardest time I’ve ever had in my life, the downest time.” It was so bad, in fact, that she took eight months off from work and retreated to Brazil. “Of course, I lost a lot of money, but all I wanted was to be with my mom and dad and my sisters,” she says. “I think the hard way is the best way to learn, because it forces you to go deep inside yourself to figure things out, [and now] I am thankful for that time, because I learned so much. I had to grab myself from the bottom and say, ‘Get up.’ That’s when I learned everything is positive, nothing is negative. Everything is growing and learning. You have to live life. You can’t be scared.”
And so Gisele is preparing for the next chapter of her life. This month, she is moving to New York, giving up her house in Los Angeles, so that she can focus more intensively on what she insists are her final two years of modeling. “I moved to L.A. for love. I was in a long-distance relationship and I wanted to be close to him. This was the first love of my life, so that was it: ‘I’m moving, I’m in love.’ But now it’s been four years and it’s been hard. I’ve had to cancel a lot of jobs.” She plans to leave her two horses and three of her dogs behind in L.A. “They are going to have Leonardo,” she says, “and they are going to have me. I just don’t want to keep a house there.” Only little Vida, who travels everywhere with her, will live full-time in New York.
And after modeling? More movies—maybe. She is also looking into expanding her licensing business to include clothing and perhaps home-decorating products. “I want to have my own brand,” she says, “my own company.” But her “dream”—what she swears is going to happen, “because when I say I am going to do something, it happens”—is to establish a foundation for the education of children in Brazil’s urban slums. Gisele says she already donates 5 percent of her earnings to government-run charities in Brazil, but the new foundation would bear her name and be financed in part by her licensing business and by her own fund-raising. She wants to focus on the arts, helping children develop talents that they can’t focus on in school—if they even go to school. Who knows what surprises could come of that? Perhaps the next Gisele.
Back on the beach, Gisele slouches in a gorgeous Calvin Klein dress that looks as if it could finance a foundation all its own. “You know, there was the first year when people said, ‘Oh, you are the model of the year.’ And the next year they said, ‘Oh, you are the model of the year.’ And I said, ‘What is this “model of the year”? So what?’ For me, I never wanted to be famous. It’s a job. I work like crazy, but when I go home, I’m happy.”
