The leggy beauty channels her iconic predecessors and opens up about Tom Brady, marriage, and how she stays super.

Gisele Bündchen whirls through her West Village brownstone — a tornado in skinny black jeans, tank top, filmy cardigan, and hausfrau slippers. Devoid of makeup, her mane of tawny hair slightly mussed, she speaks in a rapid-fire, throaty Brazilian accent. “I’m a very hyper person,” she says, rummaging through imaginary piles of clutter in her sparely decorated home away from home. (She splits her time among New York, Los Angeles, and Boston, where she lives with Tom Brady.) Indeed, while the 28-year-old could easily rest on her laurels given her enormous supermodular success, stillness just isn’t part of her repertoire.

Though Gisele clocks in at nearly six feet and has a bod that stops traffic (but is a mere size 4), it’s the one-two punch of her significant physical assets and her wham-bam personality that has not only catapulted her to the top of the modeling world but also kept her firmly at its apex for a decade and counting. “She is even better in the flesh,” says Dior designer John Galliano. “I think it was her first season in Paris when she came to do a fitting. I had heard about Gisele, but when she walked in the room I felt like my fingers had been put into the electrical socket, like, pwoah! Pure electricity.”

“What I love about her is her sensuality and energy,” seconds designer Donatella Versace. “Gisele is one of a kind.”

TEN PICTURES OF GISELE FROM THE MAGAZINE, PLUS MORE FROM THE ARTICLE AFTER THE JUMP!

In her ascendancy after the waif era, Gisele recalled the supermodels of the early ’90s: Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Tatjana Patitz. Of course, Gisele doesn’t think of herself as a supermodel at all. “I really don’t feel like that word. It doesn’t resonate for me. It doesn’t define me,” she says, hands flapping about as she reclines on a linen-covered overstuffed sofa. “As long as I’m a good person and I do things from the heart, that’s all that matters.”

“The great thing about her is that she grew up from the ’supermodel Gisele’ into this responsible, amazing woman with an extraordinary and positive energy, ready to help anyone who needs it,” says Peter Lindbergh. At Bazaar’s shoot, she is friendly to everyone (down to the last production assistant), raids the cookie plate herself, and chats nonstop. She manages to keep it real despite the maelstrom of press reports chronicling her engagement and nuptials to Brady, the New England Patriots quarterback and her beau of two years. “Gossip is poison,” she says bluntly.

“Tom is a good guy,” she continues tentatively. “He has a very pure heart. He’s very naive, almost like a child. That is my favorite quality about him. One thing that I thought was so amazing when I first met him is that he is innocent. He sees the world with colored glasses.” (While Gisele speaks several languages, occasionally some charming malapropisms escape her.) “It’s beautiful, but I think that is rare. I love that about him. No one else sees that. He’s very strong and focused in his job, but he’s so sensitive, it’s amazing.”

Gisele’s earnest approach harkens back to what she proudly admits are her humble beginnings and close-knit family. Raised in Horizontina, Brazil, then a town of about 10,000, she’s one of six girls (one of whom is her fraternal twin).

“There were no traffic lights in my city, no movie theater — one hotel, and one bank,” she says affectionately of her hometown. Her father and mother raised their six daughters while working, respectively, as a teacher and a bank cashier. “We didn’t have a housekeeper, so we all cleaned the house.”

The prematurely willowy Gisele was tapped at just 13 by an Elite agent at a shopping mall. “I looked like a mosquito then,” she says, laughing and bugging her eyes, but by the following year she was living on her own and making a living as a model. “Maybe if my family had been wealthy, I wouldn’t have done it, but because they weren’t, I decided to go,” she says. “I didn’t want to leave my whole family, but my parents were working and I had five sisters, so things were challenging. I figured I could be independent and work. I thought I could take care of myself and it would be one less child for them to worry about.”

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