Super-model Gisele Bündchen, wife of NFL legend Tom Brady, revealed how she was traumatized at the age of 18 when she was made to wear a breast-baring outfit at a fashion show.
Bündchen told British Vogue she wound up crying at the Alexander McQueen fashion show in 1998 when she saw the outfit she would wear on the catwalk.
“This was one of the most traumatizing moments,” Bündchen, who was born in Brazil, recalled. “I didn’t have a fitting so when I showed up at the show, I was like, ‘So what am I wearing?’”
She noted that she “could say a few words” in English “but I didn’t understand half the things. … I just pretended I understood. I had no clue. And I was like, ‘Is it a T-shirt or something?’ No, it was this. So I started crying.”
Bündchen’s tears prompted the makeup artist’s concern that they would mar her makeup.
“I had these feathers attached to my lashes so as I was crying they were ungluing and the makeup artist was like, ‘Please don’t cry!’” she remembered. “I was walking the whole time thinking, ‘I hope my dad doesn’t ever see this picture.’”
“All I wanted to do was leave but, you know, it’s one of those things that makes you stronger,” she concluded.
Bündchen recalled her surprise when she was chosen to join the runway lineup after designers and their staffs had eschewed perusing her book:
I didn’t speak English, it was my first show season in London, I did 42 castings. I remember going to all of these castings and nobody would even look at my book because it was the “heroin chic” time and I didn’t look anything like “heroin chic” obviously.
Bündchen has detailed that her makeup artist used white cosmetics to paint a shirt on her when she was fitted with an ensemble that included a fishtail skirt but no shirt. She said, “Val told me how beautiful it looked and said that the runway was so dark nobody would know.” She added, “If Val hadn’t shown up then, I seriously doubt I could have walked the runway.”
Bündchen told British Vogue that at the apex of her career, when she was 22, she was plagued by severe anxiety.
From the outside, it looked like I had everything and I was just 22 years old. … On the inside, I felt as if I’d hit rock bottom, I was starting my day with a mocha Frappuccino with whipped cream and three cigarettes, then drinking a bottle of wine every night. Imagine what that was doing to my mind …