Peak GISELE

The SUPEREST of SUPERMODELS on FOOD, FAMILY, the FUTURE, and FINDING HERSELF again

- ALICIA KENNEDY

Gisele Bündchen thinks she may have overbaked the granola. The grain-free nut-and-seed batches have come out beautifully toasted: a combination of ghee, maple syrup, spices, cashews, sesame seeds, and coconut. Yet the deeply browned oat-and-pecan mix-quite shy of burned and totally edible-is her focal point. Like any host who has prepared food for guests, she is focused on what she thinks she's messed up rather than what she's done well and will not stop apologizing.

"I'm not a chef," she tells me, throwing up her long arms. She is, though, Gisele, and with that has come all kinds of expectations ever since she left her parents, five sisters, and hometown of Horizontina, Brazil, at the age of 14 to become a model.

Bündchen's emergence in the late 1990s ignited a sea change in fashion, away from the louche androgyny that dominated the industry at the end of the last century and toward a new vitality and vivacity that she would come to represent at the beginning of this one. It wasn't just the way she looked but the kind of energy she embodied-strong, earthy, unencumbered, with a big, easy smile and permanent beach waves. From 2002 to 2016, Bündchen was listed by Forbes as the highest-paid model in the world. Even after she moved to Boston and scaled back her runway and campaign work following her marriage in 2009 to then New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, with whom she shares 14-year-old son Benny and 11-year-old daughter Vivi, the power and marketability of that image never seemed to subside. And when Bündchen and Brady announced plans in 2022 to divorce amid his retirement (and subsequent unretirement and re-retirement) from football, it took on newer-and in some ways even more challenging-dimensions.