Gisele Bundchen Biography

Name : Alias's: Gisele Bundchen

Birthday: July 20, 1980

Hometown: Horizontina, Rio Grande de Sul, Brazil

Marital Status: Single

Weight: N/A

Height: 5 feet 11 inches

Occupation : Model 

As a school girl, she was taunted with the nickname Olive Oil, the waif thin girl friend of Popeye the Sailor in cartoons. Her career as a model started when Gisele was on a school trip to Sao Paulo in 1995 when she was only 15 years old. While grabbing a Big Mac in a shopping mall, she was seen by a modeling agent who approached her and asked if she had any interest in becoming a model. Despite her father's lack of approval of the career choice, he allowed her to move to Sao Paulo and she entered the Elite Look Modeling Competition, and her career took off.

Gisele has modeled for all the major fashion houses such as Ralph Lauren, Versace, Valentino and Chloe. She also has appeared on several magazine covers such as Vogue, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar and Rolling Stone.

The last few years of the 1990s saw Gisele really burst into the fashion arena and her debut on the cover on the July 1999 issue of Vogue was supposedly seen as “The Return of the Sexy Model”. The accompanying editorial suggested that her success heralded an end to the ‘heroin chic’ image of models that had pervaded the catwalks of the 1990s. She won the joint VH1-Vogue award for Model of the Year in 1999 and a cover on the January 2000 issue of Vogue allowed her the rare achievement of three consecutive Vogue covers. She has since graced the covers of numerous publications multiple times, including ELLE, Vogue, Esquire and Marie Claire. Moreover, she has also been seen in publications that reach a broader platform outside of fashion and glamour, including Time and Newsweek. Gisele frequently works with famous photographers such as Mario Testino, Annie Leibovitz and Karl Lagerfeld and rivals the late Princess Diana for the largest number of magazine cover features in the world.

Other business ventures include Gisele’s own line of flip-flops, Ipanema Gisele Bündchen, which can sell for as much as $230 for one pair. The model also owns the Palladium Executive, a hotel in Southern Brazil. Forbes magazine names her as the world’s top earning model in the World’s Top Earning 15 Supermodels list in 2007.