Gisele Caroline Bündchen

Gisele Caroline Bündchen

Gisele Caroline Nonnenmacher Bündchen was born on 20 July 1980 in the Brazilian town of Tres de Maio to Vania Nonnenmacher, a bank clerk pensioner, and Valdir Bundchen, a university teacher. She grew up in Horizontina, Rio Grande do Sul, with her five sisters: Raquel, Graziela, Gabriela, Rafaela, and Patricia, who is Gisele’s twin and younger than her by only five minutes. The region in Southern Brazil where Gisele is from has a large population of Brazilians of German descent. Gisele herself is of distant German descent on both her maternal and paternal sides: she had great-great grandparents who came to Brazil from Germany, and she maintains that she belongs to the sixth generation of her family in Brazil. She was raised as a Roman Catholic, speaking Portuguese as her first language and English as her second, though she learnt some German in school but admits to unfortunately forgetting most of it.

Gisele originally wanted to be a professional volleyball player and supposedly toyed with the idea of pursuing it by playing for the Brazilian national team. In 1993, though, at just 13, she and two of her sisters were encouraged by their mother to enroll in a modeling course. The next year, the 14-year-old was discovered in a shopping mall by a modeling agency and was later selected for the national Elite Look of the Year contest, where she came in second place. She went on to be placed fourth in the world contest, in Spain, and moved to New York City in 1996 to debut her modeling career at Fashion Week.