It's possible to
It’s possible to locate the exact instant when Gisele Bündchen became the globe’s reigning icon of feminine perfection: an April 7, 1999, shoot in the studio of the legendary photographer Irving Penn. That shoot marked the demise of fashion’s so-called heroin-chic phase and the advent of a new, commercial era, in which models would dream of walking the runway for Victoria’s Secret as much as they would for, I’m spitballing here, Alexander McQueen gazing enigmatically over her shoulder, her hair thickly tangled, her body completely nude.
In its July 1999 issue, Vogue used the black-and-white photo to illustrate an editorial called “The Return of the Curve.” Gisele would appear on five of the magazine’s covers in the next year and would ignite an international fever for Brazilian models, and a more localized one in Hollywood for flip-flops and radioactively golden skin. Her Photoshop physique—volleyball-player limbs, Modigliani torso, actual breasts—would drive thousands of her countrywomen to seek implants (I’m not making this up; it was in The Wall Street Journal) and would help transform a cheesy mall-store company, Victoria’s Secret, into a cheesy megacorporation. Today Gisele says simply, “I was there at the right time, I guess. I was the Girl Who Did That Picture, you know?” In Penn’s photograph, she seems to be glancing backward at fashion history even as her angled waist carries her off the far edge of the frame. A print of the picture sold at auction at Christie’s this past spring for $193,000
