Gisele

The legendary supermodel traded the runway for family, mindfulness, and environmental advocacy. And at 42, she's just getting started.

- By Chantal Fernandez

To most of the world, Gisele Bündchen is a bona fide supermodel—so famous she doesn’t need a last name. But to nine-year-old Vivian, Bündchen is better known as Mommy. And on a recent summer day in Paris, Mommy was up to something strange. Bündchen brought her along to a fashion shoot for the first time in years. This time, her youngest child was old enough to take in the whirlwind of activity that surrounds her mother’s unique skill set. “She saw me with all these different hairdos and makeup—she didn’t understand why,” Bündchen says, laughing in her distinctive, throaty timbre. “She’s like, ‘Mommy, you look so much prettier without all that! Why are they touching you? Can they stop?’” Her response to her perplexed daughter was simple. “Listen, this is fashion!”

Bündchen tells me this story a few weeks later, Zooming from a sunny terrace in the Bahamas. She’s on holiday with her family and back in Mommy mode—no makeup or hairdos in sight. Her trademark honey-gold tresses frame her tanned shoulders.

The anecdote was her way of answering me when I asked if her kids (including Benjamin, 12, and stepson Jack, 15) were aware of just how good she is at the job that turned her into a global celebrity. And by that, I meant— do they understand that she ushered in a new aesthetic era for fashion when she was just a teenager? That she signed record-high contracts and outearned all her peers for more than a decade?