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Gisele Caroline Nonnenmacher Bündchen (born July 20, 1980) is a Brazilian supermodel.. According to Forbes, she is currently the sixteenth richest woman in the entertainment world, having earned $33 million in 2007, adding to her estimated $150 million fortune. She is currently listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the "world's richest supermodel". She is currently dating New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.

Nude videos

 

Family and early life

Bündchen was born in the Brazilian town of Três de Maio and grew up in Horizontina, Rio Grande do Sul, to Vânia Nonnenmacher, a bank clerk pensioner, and Valdir Bündchen, a university teacher and writer. She has five sisters — Raquel, Graziela, Gabriela, Rafaela and her fraternal twin Patrícia, Gisele's junior by five minutes. Bündchen was raised as a Roman Catholic.

She is from Southern Brazil, a region whose population is largely composed of Brazilians of German descent. Bündchen is of distant German ancestry in both sides of her family: her great-great-grandparents immigrated to Brazil from Germany. In regards to her ethnic background, Gisele was quoted:

 

Modeling sex scene

Originally, Bündchen wanted to be a professional volleyball player and considered playing for the Brazilian team, Sogipa. While in school, Bündchen was so thin that her friends used to call her "Olívia Palito" (Portuguese for Olive Oyl, Popeye's skinny girlfriend), and "Saracura" (a type of Brazilian shorebird).

In 1993, a then-13-year-old Bündchen joined a modeling course with her sisters Patrícia and Gabriela at her mother's insistence. The course, instructed by Dilson Stein, was designed for teenagers aspiring to become models. The following year, Stein took Bündchen, along with some other girls to São Paulo to give them an opportunity to walk in a big city and to be evaluated by Brazilian Elite agents. She was subsequently selected for a national contest, Elite Look of the Year, in which she placed second — Claudia Menezes, from Bahia, took first place. Bündchen placed fourth in the world contest, held in Ibiza, Spain. In 1996, Bündchen moved to New York City to begin her modeling sex scene, debuting at Sex Week.

Her debut on the cover of the July 1999 issue of Vogue magazine, and the accompanying editorial entitled, "The Return of the Sexy Model" is widely viewed as marking the end of the fashion's "heroin chic" era. She graced the cover again in November and December of that year. She won the VH1/Vogue Model of the Year for 1999, and a January 2000 cover gave her the rare honor of three consecutive Vogue covers. In 2000, she was the fourth model in history to grace the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, when she was named "the most beautiful girl in the world". Bündchen has been on the covers of many top fashion magazines including W, Harper's Bazaar, ELLE, Allure, international editions of Vogue, as well as style and lifestyle publications such as i-D, The Face, Arena, Citizen K, Flair, GQ, Esquire and Marie Claire. She has also been featured in broader market publications such as Time, Vanity Fair, Forbes, Newsweek, Veja, totaling almost 500 magazine covers throughout the world.

Bündchen consistently works with acclaimed photographers such as Mario Testino, Steven Meisel, Nick Knight, Mert and Marcus, Rankin, Annie Leibovitz, Karl Lagerfeld, Peter Lindbergh, Mario Sorrenti and Patrick Demarchelier, among others, and renowned directors such as Jean Baptiste Mondino and Bruno Aveillan.

According to Claudia Schiffer: "Supermodels, like we once were, don't exist any more." and reckons that Gisele Bündchen is the only one who comes close to earning the supermodel title.

 

Endorsements and earnings

Since her debut, Bündchen has been the face of a variety of advertising campaigns including several seasons of Christian Dior, Balenciaga, Mervyn's, Dolce & Gabbana, Missoni, Versace, Céline, Givenchy, Bvlgari, Lanvin, Guerlain, Valentino, Ralph Lauren, Earl Jean, Zara, Chloé, Michael Kors, Louis Vuitton, and Victoria's Secret. She has appeared in advertisements for Nivea lotion and is the face of several Brazilian brands including Vivo, Multiplan (Shopping Malls), Colcci and Credicard (Citibank). After C&A Brazil hired Bündchen as a spokesmodel and began airing television commercials, sales increased by 30%.

In May of 2006, Bündchen signed another multi-million dollar deal, this time with American giant Apple Computer. She starred in an advertising campaign to promote the new Macintosh line through the Get a Mac advertisements.

She has her own line of sandals with footwear company Grendene called Ipanema Gisele Bündchen. Forbes puts her 53rd on their list of the most powerful celebrities of 2007 due to the success of her shoe line. Custom Ipanema flip-flops sell for as much as $230 a pair. She is also the owner of a hotel in the south of Brazil, the Palladium Executive.

On May 1, 2007, it was announced that Bündchen had ended her contract with Victoria's Secret. The New York Post's Page Six reported that Bündchen had left Victoria's Secret because she just wanted to move on, not because she didn't get paid enough.

In July of 2007, having earned an estimated total of $33 million in the past 12 months, Forbes magazine named her the world's top-earning model in the list of the World's 15 Top-Earning Supermodels.

 

Gisele Bündchen Stock Index

An American economist named Fred Fuld developed a stock index to measure the profit performance improvement of companies represented by Gisele Bündchen compared to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. According to Fuld, the Gisele Bündchen Stock Index was up 15% during the interval of time between May and July of 2007, substantially surpassing the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was up just 8.2%.

 

Social activism

Bündchen has long been a social activist, lending her support and image for a number of charities and humanitarian causes, like the I am African campaign, painting her face for protesting against the lack of attention above the HIV African victims and also was, without payment, the face of American Express Red Card, a initiative launched by U2 front man Bono and Bobby Shriver to send a money percentage of financial transactions with this credit card for HIV African victims.

She already gave a São Paulo Sex Week's payment check for Zero Hunger (in Portuguese: Fome Zero), a Brazilian government program introduced by the Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2003, and nowadays, her main social activism is to protect the Amazon Rainforest water sources, donating for this cause a percentage of profits reached with her line of sandals named Ipanema Gisele Bündchen for helping projects like Nascentes do Brasil, ISA, Y Ikatu Xingu and De Olho nos Mananciais.

 

Tribute to Gisele (song)

A Brazilian singer and songwriter named Gabriel Guerra, along with Pedro Cezar, another musician, wrote as homage the song Tributo a Gisele (Tribute to Gisele in Portuguese)., which currently became theme of the official supermodel's website. In January of 2008 she met Gabriel Guerra at Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro where she was as guest at the time.