The Beauty of Being of Gisele

For 30 years, we have been jealous of the groundbreaking supermodel’s beauty, her body, her family, and her fame. But for Gisele, life isn’t about living in the spotlight—it’s about gratitude and harmony. Over a couple hours in her Miami home, Gisele opens up about finding herself again at 46, revealing why the thing we should be most envious of is her joy.

When she was 15 years old, Gisele Bündchen left Horizontina, Brazil, and moved to Tokyo to become a model. It was 1995. She didn’t speak Japanese or English. To reach her parents, grandparents, and five sisters, she used an international calling card on a landline phone. She would speak to them every 15 days, exactly.

“It was, in a way, liberating because I felt like I was living life,” Gisele says, thinking back to getting lost on the subway, navigating teenage growing pains, and learning how to integrate into a foreign reality. “I was experiencing life.”

Thirty-one years later, there is little of life Gisele hasn’t experienced. She walked her first major runway show for Alexander McQueen in 1998, and for the next decade was a regular on the catwalk for Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, Valentino, and Marc Jacobs. She signed an advertising contract with Dior, posing for Nick Knight amongst bubbles and saddle bags, then another with Dolce & Gabbana for its glittering perfume The One, and then another with Victoria’s Secret. She routinely wore the brand’s Red Hot Fantasy Bra—estimated to be worth $15 million in 2000.

Gisele was the Forbes highest-paid model for 12 years in a row, from 2005 to 2016. Her own website estimates she has appeared on an unprecedented 1,200 magazine covers (this issue will be her seventh for i-D). She walked the runway during the 2016 Olympic Opening Ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, released multiple singles, and has appeared in a handful of movies, from Taxi (2004) to The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Gisele has fundraised for Lotus House, Save the Children, The Red Cross, and more. In 2016, Taschen published a book commemorating her 20 years of modelling, retailing for $700 and selling out in one day. The cover shot is by Irving Penn of a nude Gisele. (“I still have the note from him saying that it was wonderful. ‘You did great.’”) Inside are now-legendary photographs by Steven Meisel, David LaChapelle, Inez and Vinoodh, and Juergen Teller. Gisele has published one autobiography and one cookbook, which is to say nothing of the digests she posts on Instagram to her 22 million followers. She is so famous and so known, from Brazil to Tokyo to New York to Mars, that it would be impossible for any one of us to calculate exactly where we know her from or how many times we’ve seen her face.

And yet, for Gisele, who turned 46 in July, those wandering Tokyo days are among her most special. “My whole thing is going back to that,” she tells me, tucked into an armchair in a white tank and jean shorts. “How can I create more of that reality in my life?”

You see, despite being the object of so many gazes, Gisele prefers to set hers on the sun, the sea, the sky. She was born on a farm in Brazil, surrounded by her grandparents, parents, sisters, and pets. Now, 6,900 kilometres away, she’s recreated that paradise in Northern Miami with her children Benjamin (16), Vivian (13), and a baby boy (16 months), her husband Joaquim, and a pair of dogs. 

“Life is a gift,” she says. “I think I have so much joy in my life because I really see the ordinary as the extraordinary… The sun rises every day. You can walk around and be grateful for it, or you can just be disconnected from all these incredible things. You can be robbed of your life if you think life is this”—she mimics looking down at her phone—“and you forget life is so much more.”

She smiles, sipping from her room-temperature water. “Anyway, I’m sure you have more questions for me.”

Because we got into the meaning of life and Gisele’s very philosophy of being so quickly into our first meeting, here’s what happened in the lead-up—minutes one through seven:

1. I enter Gisele’s small ranch home a couple blocks from her larger, beachfront estate. I am promptly served her homemade granola and her proprietary tea (warming, like dark chocolate and honey).

2. Alfie, her gigantic German Shepherd, comes in first and gives me the once-over. “He’s my protector,” Gisele smiles, kicking off her sandals and wrapping me up in a hug.

3. “You smell amazing,” she says, and I just give her the bottle of perfume in my purse. She asks if it has parabens, and I say I don’t know, and she tells me never to use anything with parabens, especially on your wrists or neck. It’s been three months and I am still too embarrassed to research: Does Maison Louis Marie’s scent Aboukir have parabens?

4. She checks my astrological vibe to make sure this interview will go well: “What’s your sign?” she asks squarely.

“Cancer. I knew we’d talk about it. I read you’re a Cancer, Scorpio Moon. What’s your rising?”

“Capricorn.”

“Leo Moon, Leo Rising.”

“Oh, go girl! I don’t even know how I ended up doing this job. If you let me, I would just never leave my house, because I’m a crab. And with the Scorpio Moon, for me, if it’s not deep, I don’t want to talk about it.”

That’s the guiding premise of being Gisele: Always searching for depth, connection, and meaning. In some way, modelling was the perfect job for her—homey, crablike tendencies notwithstanding—because it allowed her to find connections the world over. The high-low of the industry, which led to anxiety attacks in her mid-20s, was the impetus for Gisele’s soul searching. “Shit happens to all of us, but I think I don’t stay there,” she says of the down days. “I learned how to meditate. It’s like you can take a step back: You can be having an experience and observing yourself having that experience at the same time.”

Meditation led her to yoga, which she practises routinely, and then to Pilates and then to jujitsu. Recently, she has added weight training. “I do weights three times a week. I do Pilates once or twice a week. I do yoga two or three times a week. I work out every day because, for me, working out—I don’t see it as something I have to do. I see it as something I get to do,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if I’m surfing, if I’m playing volleyball with my daughter, if I’m paddleboarding. Whatever it is, I feel like it’s a moment of being.” She bares a bicep. “Now for the first time in my life, I can do pull-ups.”

Early this summer morning, she took her baby to the park. Much like his older half-siblings, he has picked up on Gisele’s connectivity and generosity. “I have to show you this video.” For the first time, she whips out her phone and opens her camera roll. As she scrolls through—I promise I’m not trying to peek!—I realise almost every photo is of her kids. “He’s so funny,” she says of her son, captured waddling around the park with a paper towel. “I mean, he’s 16 months and he saw that I was cleaning the park—because Miami, it’s so damp all the time!—and he wanted to participate and he felt really good about it,” Gisele beams, watching her tiny son dry off the slide, the seesaw, the swing.

“Kids give us this opportunity to live again, to be more present and to experience life again. To do it maybe differently than we’ve done it before.” She pauses. “I don’t know. I find every little thing so amazing.” Gisele goes on to show me videos of Benny DJing in his bedroom, his baby brother dancing by his side. She has pictures of Vivi playing volleyball (“She’s amazing!”) and dancing with friends. She scrolls to a dancing video. “I mean, what is better than this? This is my daughter and she’s like, ‘Mum, let’s do a dance class.’ So this is us doing a dance class. I’m not so great,” Gisele laughs, “but look at her and her friend—and that’s her mum’s friend.”

She quickly scrolls through about 20 more videos before she chucks her phone away. “By the way, I don’t know if you noticed, my phone doesn’t ring. There’s no alarms. It never rings. It’s liberating.”

A silenced iPhone and spending all day with her family is a far cry from the past 30 years of Gisele’s life. To briefly summarise the lore: Her mother enrolled her, her twin sister Patí, and younger sister Gabriela in modelling classes in Brazil. Gisele was later scouted to participate in the Elite Model Look competition, and in 1995, she placed second. From 1996 to 2016, life didn’t stop—she spent the better part of her 20s and 30s at the white-hot centre of it all: Fashion, fame, celebrity, paparazzi, and money. She was signing bigger contracts than other models, getting bigger media attention, becoming an entity bigger than Gisele Bündchen from Horizontina, Brazil. She was, by 2004, a supermodel, capital S. Everything about her sparkled.

“I’ve experienced the rat race. I was on the hamster wheel in my early 20s,” she says. “I won Model of the Year at 19. I worked so hard from 14 to get to that place, I felt like I couldn’t say no [to major jobs].” And sure, Gisele encountered so much of the bullshit so many models of the ’90s and ’00s did. She tried not to let her industry’s lack of protection faze her. “Even though I wasn’t going to the parties, I was doing 360 days [of work a year]. I wanted to be the best that I could be every day. I wanted to bring my best.”

We start to look through some of her runway fits from her catwalk days and she sparks up with delight. “Girl, it was very tight inside. You couldn’t really move so much—but, I mean, look how he made you look!” she cheers of a supersized Fall 2004 Christian Dior look by John Galliano. “I’m forever grateful to McQueen, I’m forever grateful to John. I was always so excited to do the Dior shows because I never knew what I was going to look like.”

She singles out a Galliano show for Dior held at Versailles. “This was 60 years of Dior and I wasn’t even doing shows anymore. John was like, ‘Please, Gisele. This is all my muses and it’s going to be the 60 years, it’s to be in Versailles.’ I was like, ‘I must do it,’” she remembers. “Look at these shoes. It was like a platform without a heel. I was walking on cement, like bricks. It was crazy. I was like, ‘Am I going to fall and break my ankle?’”

But that’s the thing about Gisele: Even if she’s struggling to walk or struggling to feel beautiful—as she often recounts of that first-ever McQueen show, where she hit the runway topless with a trompe l’oeil white tank painted on by Val Garland, rain falling and her lashes dripping into her eyes—she is always going to do her best. “I didn’t say no or complain because people were giving me the opportunity,” she reflects. “I came in, I did my job, I went home… and I think what I really appreciate and really enjoyed about fashion is that it got me to access and experience different sides of me. I really wanted to be the best canvas for the creatives. I felt like it was my way of contributing.”

But working in the oil-slick glossy world of new millennium modelling meant that few people saw Gisele as a full person—because of her beauty, her chameleonic qualities, and her prowess, she was quickly regarded as an idol. Nice to look at, nothing to say. The first time she appeared in i-D, on the cover in December 1998, she wasn’t interviewed. Instead, the photographer who took the picture was, and here’s what he had to say about the smart and vibrant Gisele: “She’s certainly gorgeous. I’d marry her.”

“I’m not defined by other people’s opinions. I feel like I get to choose how I want to live my life.”

Her “godfather” in the turbulent fashion industry was Steven Meisel. (Are you surprised that the greatest model of her generation would find kinship with the greatest photographer of his?) In one of the earliest pieces of press about Gisele, a New York Magazine article from 1999, Meisel already saw her as more than a body to stand in front of his lens. He felt her spirit. “Gisele is able to change because she wants to—it’s not in her looks; it’s in her mental process. She is malleable and is willing to be a silent screen star because she understands that modelling is acting,” he told the mag. He later wrote the foreword for her Taschen book, and she still speaks of him as her guardian angel. “I’m grateful for him. I don’t think I would have been the model that I was if it wasn’t for him, for real. We got to play together. I shot with him every week.”

And yet, after weekly Meisel shoots, over 130 Vogue covers, and decades on billboards and TV ad spots, Gisele wanted more. Well—maybe not more in the way you and I might think of it. She wanted to actually enjoy what she’d accomplished, and that meant leaving the fracas behind. After a decade in Boston, she relocated here, to Florida, to co-parent her older children and set up a new world of sea and sun and sand. Being mum, practising gratitude, taking care of herself and her community have become more valuable than any seven-figure ad job: “I say no to 99 percent of the jobs I’m offered because, when I put it on the scale, I’m like, ‘Am I going to miss my daughter’s volleyball game? Am I going to miss going to the park with my son? Am I going to miss my son DJing?’”

That’s why, with the exception of a few trips to her home in Costa Rica, to see family in Brazil, and recently, to Tahiti, Gisele rarely leaves Florida. “Having a baby at this moment of my life is such a gift, because I’m in a different place. I don’t have anything to prove. I don’t feel like I really, quite frankly, care.”

“I’m not defined by other people’s opinions,” she continues, firmly. “I feel like I get to choose how I want to live my life.”

Being alive today can feel like a quest for more: Make more money. Diversify your portfolio. Get PRP+ to be more beautiful and then Ozempic to be more svelte. Become a brand and use that brand to become more famous. Every day of your life can be used to sell something or say something or self-improve. I don’t think I have ever encountered a person more satisfied with exactly how her life is than Gisele. She has a lot, sure, but it’s long been enough. She’s done a lot, sure, but she’s not looking back. She’s been everywhere, yeah, but she isn’t driven by getting in your face.

She’s not a brand. She’s not an entrepreneur. She’s not a self-help guru—even though I tell her she should have a podcast. She’s not forcing Gisele-dom down our throats and, in some way, it seems like she doesn’t really want to be famous at all. That she’s financially well-off, she tells me, is just an opportunity to take care of her sisters and her family. She doesn’t want fancy clothes. She hasn’t been to New York in over two years and she’s not eager to come back.

“At the end of the day, this is your temple, this is your life, this is your journey. How do you want it to look? What do you want it to be? Who defines success?” she asks, as concerned in that moment with my well-being as with her own. “What is success? Some people say success is power, money, fame, more. Some people say success is being able to spend time with your kids, to have food on your table, to have a home to live in, to have great relationships and actually enjoy every day. I find that, quite frankly, much more successful than…” she trails off, not eager to point a finger. “It’s up to each person to define, because when I was in my 20s, success was different than what I feel today.”

“What do you want your legacy to be?” I ask as we’re wrapping up our conversation.

“In the end, I ended up having the best time. I ended up enjoying it all, staying in it, learning from it, and growing up in it. It’s been a blessing. However people see me, that’s okay with me. I want to look back and think, ‘I really enjoyed this journey. I really loved fully. I really experienced every emotion. I really had meaningful relationships. I tried to make the world a better place, and I made my surroundings more harmonious and loving and beautiful.’ I want my kids to feel like I was a great mum and that I helped them become the best version of themselves. I want to feel like I lived striving to be the best version of myself. Hopefully, I can look back and say I did it.”

Today, after I pack up my things and head for Miami International Airport, she’ll go to a birthday dinner. It’s a rare night out for Gisele, and after decades of no carbs and no dairy, she might have some of her friend’s homemade sourdough. “What’s better than bread and cheese? Oh my god, I don’t know!” she laughs. Tomorrow, she’ll wake up early to paddleboard. She’s worried about me not seeing the sea one last time before I get on a plane back to New York, but she’s calmed when I tell her I spent two hours on the beach this morning. As I wheel away my little suitcase and say goodbye, she pops her head out the front door with a final blessing. “Live the life you want to live! Everything else is going to shake out.”

Via: I-D Magazine