No Pants, No Problem: Gisele’s Leather Power Play
Hotter Than Miami Asphalt
Gisele Bündchen photographed for Elisabetta Franchi's fall 2025 ad campaign by Luigi & Iango, WWD
Leather, no trousers, no compromise. Under the unforgiving Miami sun, Gisele Bündchen returned to the spotlight this August in a campaign as sweltering as the asphalt beneath her boots. In one look, she wore a maroon corset jacket with nothing but triangle briefs; in another, a crystal-encrusted G-string paired with crocodile-print thigh-high boots and opera-length leather gloves. She shifted between sheer lace, jewel-studded lingerie and plunging bodysuits, every detail styled to maximise audacity. Braless, pantsless, unapologetic—the Brazilian supermodel stood defiantly in the heat and captioned her Instagram post with a wink: “Now that’s what I call hot.” It was more than a throwaway line. It was a declaration.
This was no simple fashion shoot. It was a spectacle of endurance and audacity, a woman embracing discomfort and turning it into power. Months after giving birth, Bündchen presented herself not as softened or subdued, but as sharp-edged and unapologetic, wielding leather as both armour and provocation.
The choice to strip away trousers—a garment synonymous with authority for decades—reads as both cheeky rebellion and deliberate inversion of power dressing. In a world that often renders older women and mothers invisible, here was Bündchen stepping forward, incandescent, daring the gaze to look away. Fashion has always thrived on heat: the pressure to dazzle, to shock, to endure. Bündchen’s Miami moment is not just hot; it’s incendiary—a reminder that style is never just about clothes, but about the bodies and the courage inside them.
The Supermodel’s Second Act
Gisele Bündchen in Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 1998 show, Vogue France
To understand the shockwave of Gisele Bündchen’s latest campaign, it’s worth rewinding the clock. In the late 1990s, the industry was still under the pall of “heroin chic”—a look that peaked in the early to mid 90s and was rooted in fragility and nihilism. Born of the grunge era and epitomised by pale skin, hollow eyes and emaciated limbs, it stood in stark contrast to the glossy athleticism of the 1980s supermodels. What began as rebellion quickly ossified into cliché: beauty as illness, style as disaffection (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2025).
Then came Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 1998 show in London. Onto the catwalk strode a seventeen-year-old Brazilian girl with bronzed skin, long limbs and unapologetically healthy curves. Bündchen’s presence was so radically at odds with the prevailing aesthetic that she is widely credited with burying heroin chic for good (Harper’s Bazaar, 2023). The industry dubbed her “The Body,” Her ascent was meteoric: a coveted Victoria’s Secret Angel, a record-breaking lingerie show (hello, Red Hot Fantasy bra), and over 1,200 magazine covers, according to her own official website. Gisele Bündchen became the most bankable face in fashion history with Forbes ranking her the world’s highest-paid model for fifteen consecutive years (Forbes, 2014). She wasn’t just modelling clothes—she was reshaping cultural appetites .
Her 2015 runway retirement was taken as a symbolic curtain fall: a supermodel bowing out at the top (Glamour UK, 2015). In 2022, against the backdrop of a public divorce and new personal chapters, Bündchen quietly reshaped her narrative. And now, with the Elisabetta Franchi Fall 2025 campaign, she makes her most electrifying return yet—not as the body that changed fashion—but as a woman commanding it on her own terms.
Leather, Lustre, and a Crystal G-String
Gisele Bündchen photographed for Elisabetta Franchi's fall 2025 ad campaign by Luigi & Iango, Fashion Gone Rogue
The Fall 2025 Elisabetta Franchi campaign trades subtlety for spectacle, and at its centre is Gisele Bündchen—unapologetically styled in looks that smoulder as much as they provoke. The images are pure theatre: corset-cut leather jackets left defiantly undone, triangle briefs peeking beneath tailored edges, and crocodile-print thigh-high boots that tower with predatory intent. In one shot, a crystal-encrusted G-string catches the light with a glinting vulgarity that feels both decadent and dangerous.
The styling choices are equally arresting. Gone is the spa-fresh, minimalist aura that has long defined Bündchen’s public image. In its place: a vampy ’80s silhouette, wet-look hair slicked into submission, eyes smoked with charcoal drama, lips lacquered in oxblood. The transformation is jarring precisely because it is so deliberate; the supermodel who once personified quiet luxury now plays dominatrix, conjuring the glamour of nightclub excess and high-octane rebellion.
This calculated departure forces a new reading of her image. The wardrobe’s hardness—metallic embellishments, second-skin leathers, and razor-sharp tailoring—suggests armour, a shield of strength. Yet the bareness of the look, the refusal of trousers or cover, underscores vulnerability. It is this tension—between exposure and protection, between sensuality and command—that makes the campaign so magnetic. Bündchen’s body becomes a battleground where power and fragility are staged simultaneously, each amplifying the other.
The result is less about nudity and more about narrative. By oscillating between goddess and gladiator, Bündchen presents herself as both subject and spectacle, an icon unafraid to fracture her own myth. For a model so often associated with ease and natural beauty, the leather-clad, crystal-strapped reinvention lands as a provocation: a reminder that fashion’s sharpest edge lies not in what is worn, but in the audacity of how it is worn.
Motherhood, Age, and the Unfiltered Gaze
Shakira and Jennifer Lopez 2020 Super Bowl halftime show, Los Angeles Times
Gisele Bündchen stepping into a campaign like this at forty-five, just months after giving birth, is more than a career manoeuvre. It is an act of rebellion. For all our supposed progress, attractive older women remain lightning rods for criticism simply for ageing visibly, boldly, and beautifully—especially if they are mothers.
Consider Shakira and Jennifer Lopez. Their 2020 Super Bowl halftime show was unapologetically exuberant: physically demanding, culturally layered, and artistically sharp. Yet the discourse quickly collapsed into noise about age and appearance. Social media bristled with pearl-clutching over their outfits, or accusations that the choreography was “raunchy”—a moral panic amplified by the fact that Lopez’s then-eleven-year-old daughter appeared on stage (Nicki Swift, 2020). Never mind that male artists of similar or greater age routinely gyrate through performances without anyone declaring themselves “ashamed for their children,” (Glamour, 2020). The message was clear: older women, especially mothers, are not meant to be hot.
Even Bündchen, despite a career predicated on beauty, hasn’t escaped this cultural policing. When she announced her pregnancy at forty-four with jiu-jitsu instructor Joaquim Valente, the backlash was swift and cruel. Commentators dismissed her as a “cougar,” accused her of panicked “rebound” behaviour, and suggested she was “locking him in before her window closed” (Grazia, 2024). As if Valente could not possibly desire her—worse, as if she had no right to desire or be desired herself.
Against that backdrop, Bündchen’s campaign—bare legs, leather corsetry, crystal detail glinting under the Miami sun—reads as pure defiance. It resists the unspoken edict that older women must retreat from desirability once they have children. She is not asking permission to be seen as sensual, powerful, or relevant. She is declaring it.
And in doing so, she places the unfiltered gaze back where it belongs: on her own terms.
Reinvention as Survival
Gisele Bündchen photographed by BACKGRID, British Vogue
Gisele Bündchen photographed for Elisabetta Franchi's fall 2025 ad campaign by Luigi & Iango, Fashion Gone Rogue
If rebellion is one part of Bündchen’s campaign, reinvention is the other. The supermodel has long been a cultural shapeshifter, attuned to fashion’s restless demands. She ended heroin chic in the late ’90s with sun-kissed vitality, rebranded herself in the 2010s as the barefoot wellness icon, and more recently became the poster woman for “quiet luxury,” the soft power dressing of a post-pandemic age. At every turn, she has not simply mirrored trends but helped crystallise them.
The leather-heavy audacity of her latest campaign might, at first glance, appear to contradict the mood of the moment. Haven’t we declared spectacle passé? Hasn’t minimalism—the logo-free aesthetic, the whisper-quiet knit—become fashion’s dominant language (Vogue, 2025)? Yet fashion never moves in straight lines. It oscillates, thrives on contradiction, and extracts its charge from tension. When understatement saturates the market, spectacle regains its edge. Against a landscape of restraint, crocodile boots and crystal detail cut louder, sharper.
Bündchen’s pivot doesn’t erase her quiet luxury era—it intensifies it by offering its opposite. She proves that spectacle, deployed sparingly and deliberately, feels more dangerous, more disruptive, than endless minimalism. In this way, she is not chasing relevance; she is dictating it.
And therein lies the survival instinct. Supermodels who cling too long to one aesthetic fade into the wallpaper. Bündchen refuses that fate. By stepping into maximalist heat at forty-five, she rewrites not only her own image but also the tempo of fashion itself. If quiet luxury was fashion’s exhale, she signals that it is time to inhale again—with risk, glamour, and the audacity of reinvention.
The Heat is the Message
Gisele Bündchen photographed for Elisabetta Franchi's fall 2025 ad campaign by Luigi & Iango, Fashion Gone Rogue
The imagery of Bündchen sweating it out in crocodile boots, leather corsetry and gloves beneath Miami’s August sun is arresting in itself. But the heat is more than a backdrop—it is the message. On one level, it is simply the physical reality of shooting in head-to-toe leather in sweltering humidity. On another, it becomes a metaphor: the unrelenting pressure on women, especially women in the public eye, to remain visible, relevant and desirable no matter the climate.
Fashion has always thrived on spectacle, on pushing bodies to extremes in the pursuit of an image. What toll does this endless escalation take? For models, it can mean contorting into discomfort for hours under lights. For influencers, it’s the constant churn of content, staying “hot” for algorithms. For designers, it is the demand to deliver novelty season after season, even when creativity burns thin. Heat, in this sense, is not only physical but systemic—a condition of survival in an industry addicted to attention.
What makes Bündchen’s campaign striking is her reframing of this ordeal. “They turned the heat into fun,” she quipped afterwards, collapsing discomfort into performance. Endurance becomes play; pressure is spun as pleasure. It is a reminder of how women in fashion are expected not just to withstand the heat but to look as though they revel in it.
And yet, by leaning into this metaphor so brazenly, Bündchen also exposes its artifice. The heat is staged, the struggle aestheticised, the endurance choreographed. She reveals the paradox at the heart of fashion: that the pressure never lets up, but the power lies in deciding how it is performed—and in whose terms it is translated.
Pantsless, Power-Full
Gisele Bündchen photographed for Elisabetta Franchi's fall 2025 ad campaign by Luigi & Iango, Fashion Gone Rogue
Bündchen’s leather-clad, pants-free turn arrives at a moment when fashion’s cultural flashpoints are in sharp relief. On TikTok, a stylist’s viral decree that women over fifty should “bin” their gilets and cardigans sparked accusations of ageism and ignited debate about who gets to decide when a garment—and by extension, a woman—expires (The Sun, 2025). At the same time, the runways are awash with track pants reimagined in silk, satin and suiting—an elevation of comfort into high fashion, a signal that the industry is still trying to reconcile post-pandemic ease with its appetite for luxury (ELLE, 2025).
Placed in that context, Bündchen’s choice to appear pantsless cuts in a different direction entirely. It is neither about cosy pragmatism nor prescriptive rules. It is about audacity. The leather corsetry, thigh-high boots and crystal detail speak not to function but to defiance. She is not concerned with being age-appropriate, on-trend, or algorithm-friendly. She is concerned with presence—with making a statement that resists easy categorisation.
In doing so, Bündchen offers an alternative to both sides of the current debate. Against the ageist policing of TikTok, she embodies a refusal to retreat. Against the elevation of comfort as fashion’s new virtue, she leans into discomfort as spectacle. The result is a campaign that does not soothe or flatter but unsettles—in the best way.
That is its resonance. By stepping into the frame with bare legs and unapologetic power, Bündchen signals that empowerment in 2025 is not about conforming to rules, whether minimalist or maximalist, comfortable or chic. It is about disruption. And in choosing disruption, she reminds us that fashion’s most radical gesture is not the clothes themselves, but the courage to wear them against expectation.
When Fashion Drops the Pants
Gisele Bündchen photographed for Elisabetta Franchi's fall 2025 ad campaign by Luigi & Iango, Fashion Gone Rogue
The campaign leaves behind not just outfits but an impression—seared, like heat shimmer, into memory. Bündchen in a crystal G-string and crocodile boots, or corseted beneath a Bordeaux leather jacket, offers an image that feels both extravagant and pared back: nothing extraneous, yet impossible to ignore. It resists modesty, resists apology. The provocation lies not only in what she wears, but in what she refuses—trousers, convention, invisibility. And so the question persists: is this the sharpest articulation of her power to date, or simply another verse in fashion’s endless hymn to spectacle?
Perhaps it is both. Fashion feeds on the audacious, but rarely does it allow women—particularly older women, mothers, women whose desirability is endlessly policed—to seize that audacity on their own terms. Bündchen’s campaign interrupts that pattern. She doesn’t ask to be framed as sensual, powerful, or relevant; she declares it.
Whether read as a career reinvention, a cultural provocation, or just a flash of leather-clad bravado, the meaning is the same: she has reclaimed the narrative. Against the scrutiny, against the prescriptive rules of what women can or cannot wear at a certain age, she insists on visibility.
And perhaps that is the real disruption. In a world that still tries to put women back in their place, sometimes the most radical act is refusing to put your trousers back on.
