Gisele Caroline Bündchen (born July 20, 1980) is a Brazilian model and occasional actress. The Forbes cited her as the highest-paid model in the world and also the sixteenth richest woman in the entertainment world. She has a record of having earned $33 million in 2006 and $35 million in 2007 alone, adding to her estimated $150 million fortune. The Guinness Book recorded her as the world’s richest supermodel and has appeared on over 500 magazine covers.
Bündchen actually dreamed to be a professional volleyball player and wanted to play for the Brazilian team, Sogipa. But 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, just 13-year-old Bündchen joined a modeling course with her sisters Patrícia and Gabriela at her mother’s insistence. In 1994, Bündchen went to São Paulo on a school excursion to give them an opportunity to walk in a big city. In a shopping mall, while eating a Big Mac with her friends, Bündchen 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. Bündchen placed fourth in the world contest, held in Ibiza, Spain. In 1996, Bündchen moved to New York City to begin her modeling career, debuting at Fashion Week.
The July 1999 issue of Vogue magazine was her debut into the modeling world, 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 became the fourth model to appear on the cover of the music magazine Rolling Stone, when she was named “the most beautiful girl in the world.” She was 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 been featured both in the Pirelli Calendar 2001 and 2006and in broader market publications such as Time, Vanity Fair, Forbes, Newsweek and Veja, totaling more than 500 magazine covers throughout the world.
On August 26, 2008, the New York Daily News, in a list, named Bündchen the fourth-most-powerful person in the fashion world.
