Gisele Bundchen Bio

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Gisele Bundchen Biography

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This Gisele Bundchen biography contains information believed to be accurate as extracted from sources around the internet including Wikipedia. If you believe there are errors or omissions in this Gisele Bundchen bio, please let us know so that we can correct any inaccuracies.

Gisele Bundchen Pictures

Gisele Caroline Nonnenmacher Bundchen (born July 20, 1980) is a Brazilian model. According to Forbes, she is the highest-paid model in the world and also the sixteenth richest woman in the entertainment world, having earned $33 million in 2007 and $35 in 2008 alone, adding to her estimated $150 million fortune. She is also listed on Guinness Book of World Records as the world's richest supermodel. Gisele is the face of more than 20 brands internationally and appeared on more than 500 magazine covers on her career. It is also said that,she is the second most person, after Princess Diana, to appear on magazines, According to IMDb, career.

Gisele Bundchen: Biography

Gisele Bundchen - Family and early life

Bundchen 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 Bundchen, a university teacher and writer. She has five sisters - Raquel, Graziela, Gabriela, Rafaela and her fraternal twin Patrícia, Gisele's junior by five minutes. Bundchen was raised as a Roman Catholic, speaks Portuguese as her native language and English as a second language.

She is from Southern Brazil, a region whose population is largely composed of Brazilians of German descent. Bundchen 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, Bundchen was quoted:

Her first boyfriend in the United States was model Scott Barnhill, but they dated for only six months. After Scott she was also linked with American hotel tycoon Vikram Chatwal and Josh Hartnett, but she never confirmed the rumors about these two.

Gisele Bundchen - Modeling career

Originally, Bundchen wanted to be a professional volleyball player and considered playing for the Brazilian team, Sogipa. While in school, Bundchen 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 Bundchen joined a modeling course with her sisters Patrícia and Gabriela at her mother's insistence. The following year, Bundchen went to São Paulo in a school excursion to give them an opportunity to walk in a big city. In a shopping mall, Bundchen was discovered by a modeling agency. 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. Bundchen placed fourth in the world contest, held in Ibiza, Spain. In 1996, Bundchen moved to New York City to begin her modeling career, debuting at Fashion 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". Bundchen 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 more than 500 magazine covers throughout the world.

Bundchen consistently works with acclaimed photographers such as Mario Testino, Steven Meisel, Nick Knight, Mert and Marcus, Rankin, Annie Leibovitz, Karl Lagerfeld, Peter Lindbergh, David LaChapelle, 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 Bundchen is the only one who comes close to earning the supermodel title.

Gisele Bundchen - Endorsements and earnings

Since her debut, Bundchen 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 Bundchen as a spokesmodel and began airing television commercials, sales increased by 30%.

In May of 2006, Bundchen 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 Bundchen. 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 Bundchen had ended her contract with Victoria's Secret. The New York Post's Page Six reported that Bundchen 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 Bundchen - Gisele Bundchen Stock Index

An American economist named Fred Fuld developed a stock index to measure the profit performance improvement of companies represented by Bundchen compared to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. According to Fuld, the Gisele Bundchen 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%.

Gisele Bundchen - 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 English)., which is currently the theme of the supermodel's official website. In January of 2008 she met Gabriel Guerra at Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro where she was a guest at the time.

Gisele Bundchen - Her image as inspiration for aesthetic plastic surgeries

A result of research was publicized at February 2008 by The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS) to reveal how world celebrity images, that overwhelm popular media, influence people's choices and decisions to undergo plastic surgeries. The question asked was: What influences do celebrities have on the decisions patients make? The survey was sent to over 20,000 plastic surgeons in 84 countries.

Gisele Bundchen, Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Pamela Anderson, Sophia Loren, Brad Pitt and George Clooney were the most mentioned. Gisele won the abdomen and hair categories and was second place in the breasts category.

Gisele Bundchen - Nude photography auctioned for US$193,000.00 (£96,000.00)

At April 11, 2008, a black-and-white photo of Bundchen, shot by Irving Penn, was auctioned for USD 193,000.00 (£96,000.00). The picture was one of dozens from the collection of Gert Elfering that were sold at Christie's International in New York. In all, the auction tallied US$ 4.27 million and included pictures of Brigitte Bardot, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Carla Bruni. Bundchen's picture reached the highest price in comparison with all others famous personalities. Bardot was the second with USD 181,000.00 (£90,000.00).

Gisele Bundchen - Charity work

Bundchen lends her support and image for a number of charities and humanitarian causes, such as the I am African campaign, painting her face for protesting against the lack of attention about 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 designed a limited necklace's edition for Harper's Bazaar, crafted by jewelers Gumuchian Fils and sold to raise money for St. Jude Children's Hospital, specializing in cancer treatment. She served as the spokesperson and campaign model for Fashion Targets Breast Cancer.

Bundchen already gave a São Paulo Fashion 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 Bundchen for helping projects like Nascentes do Brasil, ISA, Y Ikatu Xingu and De Olho nos Mananciais.