Gisele caught our attention in the Met Gala of 2018 where she flaunted her beauty by wearing a custom-made GOTS certified organic silk-and-cotton dress.

After 2002, “Gisele: Fur Scum” she put herself in the driving seat and turned her life around. Bündchen stopped wearing fur, and her open-mindedness and desire to learn continue to fuel a determination to help animals and the planet. She researched how animal agriculture devastates the environment, harms human health, and hurts animals, and she and her family are now thriving on a mostly plant-based diet.

In recent years she has lent her voice, her time, her image, her money, and her vast global network to a host of environmental agents. She has planted trees in Nairobi’s Kibera, known as the most prominent urban slum in Africa. She has helped detoxify the river near Horizontina, her hometown, through the Projeto Água Limpa, a clean-water initiative she established with her family.

She starred in National Geographic’s documentary series Years of Living Dangerously, venturing into the Brazilian jungle to explore the link between deforestation and climate change.

Gisele has been a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations Environment Programme since 2009, and last September she was invited by French president Emmanuel Macron to speak to world leaders about the contamination of the global water supply and other industrial assaults. Harvard Medical School has honoured her with its Global Environmental Citizen Award. More recently, she has sought to make the fashion industry aware of its significant environmental impact. Saving the planet, she hopes, will be her enduring legacy long after the media have become as tired as she has of epithets like glamazon and Brazilian bombshell.

Nowadays, Gisele is especially keen to work for fashion brands that have shown a commitment to sustainability. Defined broadly, this means any brand willing to consider its impact on the environment, from minimizing carbon footprints to using easily replenished materials and natural dyes. Since somewhere between eight and thirteen million tons of clothing, by various estimates, end up in landfills every year, anything beautifully made and built to last qualifies as sustainable. “It’s a matter of thinking about the consequences of making something,” she says. “At what price are we creating all this beauty? People think you dump something in the river and it’s just going to disappear. Nothing disappears, as we know. Whatever gets made here stays here.”