Gisele Bundchen cried when forced to walk topless in fashion show: 'I thought about running away'

Supermodel Gisele Bundchen revealed in her memoir "Lessons" that she cried when she was forced to walk topless in a fashion show. (Getty)

Despite serving as a catalyst for the rest of her very illustrious career, Gisele Bündchen‘s first major fashion show left her in tears.

In her new memoir “Lessons,” Bündchen describes feeling terrified after she was cast in a 1998 Alexander McQueen show that would require her to hit the runway topless. At the time, the model was 18 years old and barely spoke English.

“I began to cry. I had no idea what to do,” Bündchen wrote. “Mostly, I thought about how disappointed and embarrassed my parents would be. I tried to hold back my tears, but they just kept coming down, and the black feathers glued to my lashes began coming unstuck.”

Continued the Brazilian beauty, “I thought about leaving, about running away. There was no way in the world I was going out there without a top.”

To make Bündchen more comfortable, the show’s makeup artist painted a white “top” onto her torso to create the illusion of clothes. And because the show was set on a rainy runway, she wrote, “no one could tell what was rain and what was tears.”

The model added that her family never saw photos from the show, writing, “That was probably the night I started to dissociate, to begin thinking of my public self as her and she. I was a good girl. I was a tomboy. I was someone whose big breasts had embarrassed her since she’d hit puberty. I was a girl gripped by the feat that my family would feel so embarrassed they would never talk to me again… She gave off the impression she didn’t have a care in the world.”

In other parts of the book, Bündchen opens up about contemplating suicide and the moment she found out her then-boyfriend Tom Brady had impregnated his ex-girlfriend Bridget Moynahan.

This article originally appeared in Page Six.