Fashionably Yours

She doesn’t just look like a billion bucks, but has it too! The world’s highest paid model, 30 yr old Gisele Bundchen is poised to be the first ever billionaire model, according to Forbes.

Gisele Bundchen

This beauty comes with a keen business sense. While most of her contemporaries are busy blowing up their money on binge drinking, blow and kicking back in style, Ms Bundchen has invested heavily in real estate,  a hotel business back in her home country, Brazil and has a paid job as creative director for C&A’s Gisele Bundchen Collection. All this apart from her regular modeling campaigns for brands ranging from H& M to
Christian Dior.

Her latest business venture, Hope, which is a Brazilian version of Victoria’s Secret is estimated to be her biggest moneymaker yet.

Cheers to Ms Bunchen and her fortunes. May her tribe increase!

With the invasion of European and other international models on Indian runways, it’s getting tougher for Indian models to get jobs in their own country!

The past couple of years have seen international ramp models flood fashion shows. Indian models are crying foul that Indian designers as well as fashion show organizers are choosing international models over them because they seem to be obsessed with “pale skin”.

Russians, Brazilians and European models are cashing in on India’s fashion boom but at the cost of some of India’s top models losing out. Indian models are livid about losing projects and shows in their own country and being paid a fraction of the fees of their European rivals.

Model Dipannita Sharma

Dipannita Sharma

Leading model and actress Dipannita Sharma said she believed the Indian fashion industry was in denial and that it would take many years for the prejudice to fade. “It’s not just the fashion industry, India per se is obsessed with white skin. We will take another hundred years to completely get over it. The industry doesn’t openly agree that preferring foreign models over Indian models just for the skin tone is racism. It has some kind of fairness obsession. One could have understood, if it was about getting supermodels of international fame or to work in India but that’s not happening, it’s just they want fairer skin on the Indian ramps.”

Pranab Awasti of Delhi’s Glitz Modelling agency, said “Indians in general have that inferiority complex, we have had a hangover about fair skin, since the British left India. The idea of fairness is an Indian concept and it needs to change. It is an inherent thing in Indians to see white as beautiful and black as ugly … we have this concept in our minds that only fair-skinned people can be models,” he said.

Carol Gracias

Model Carol Gracias

Indian supermodel Carol Gracias said the most successful Indian models were paid between £500 and £600 per show, a tiny fraction of the rates paid to their western counterparts, while lucrative Indian television commercial jobs mostly went to western models.

“You never see a dark-skinned girl on TV ads and that’s where the lucrative work is. Everyone uses fair-skinned girls, people use skin-lighteners like ‘Fair and Lovely’. I don’t – maybe I would have been fair and lovely by now,” she said.

News source: Telegraph.co.uk