Gisele Bündchen Is Smiling Because She Made $45 Million Last Year

From the Rich Getting Richer department: “The 10 top-earning female models on the planet made a combined $112 million in the 12 months to May — up 30% from a total of $86.5 million over the previous year. Most of this gain was enjoyed by the top three: Gisele Bündchen, Heidi Klum and Kate Moss.” Why do supermodels earn so much? After Gisele became the face of Pantene in Latin America, sales rose 40% and Bündchen got a shout-out in Proctor & Gamble’s quarterly report. She earned an estimated $45 million last year, making her once again the world’s top-earning model. [Forbes]

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Speaking of Pantene, Eva Mendes and Naomi Watts are the new faces of the hair care line in the U.S. Their respective ads will break in July. [E!]

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In honor of Mother’s Day, Lucky has a cute slideshow of designers and their mothers. Rachel Antonoff, pictured here with Shira Wall Antonoff, says: “She also offered sage shopping advice (usually when we were at The Limited Too): ‘If you’re not dying to wear it right now, don’t buy it!'” [Lucky]

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Inge Jacobsen, the art student who is rendering Vogue covers in cross-stitch, says: “I sew over the covers, which some might see as cheating, but I’m not doing this to show off my skills as an embroiderer — I’m doing it as an exploration into popular culture and the culture of massed produced imagery. It’s about taking something that is widely available and making it a one of a kind. These pieces cannot be duplicated or reproduced.” [Vogue UK]

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Aerin Lauder says Estée Lauder is “honoring our heritage” and her grandmother’s memory by launching a new perfume, “Sensuous Nude.” Isabeli Fontana is the face. [WWD]

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• More details are emerging about Patrick Robinson‘s firing at the hands of Gap C.E.O. Glenn Murphy. Murphy had earlier replaced Gap president Marka Hansen with Art Peck, and reorganized the company to create the Gap Global Design Center in New York, which is led by Pam Wallack. (Wallack is now overseeing design operations while a replacement for Robinson is found.) Although Murphy clearly didn’t feel the need to wait to fire Robinson until he had a new designer in the wings, he did wait for Wallack and Peck to be in place, according to sources. “If you take a pure designer and give him a lot of freedom, it’s not going to work, especially in a mass-driven business,” says one retail source, apparently someone within Gap. One of Gap’s main problems seems to be a breakdown between the design side and the merchandising and marketing side. “You need someone who is commercial and understands who the customer is. Ralph Lauren is not [just] a designer. Calvin Klein was not [just] a designer. They are brilliant merchants.” Interesting that WWD inserted those [just]s, without which the source’s point stands all the more clearly. [WWD]
• Cathy Horyn, on the state of fashion journalism today: “It’s a lack of original content. Sooner or later, it’s like anything, people change, people look at that and say ‘This is boring.’ And some young journalist will come along and distinguish themselves with original reporting. And they will hopefully be fluent in French and very good at reporting what’s going on at the luxury goods companies and the big brands in Europe, because there’s a complete need for that kind of reporting. You can be tough and feisty and a little bit of a guerrilla reporter, for want of a better word, and I think there’s a need for that. I don’t think a lot of the blogs are distinguishing themselves by linking and just being snarky or being opinionated. Do some reporting.” [Refinery29]
• How did the fact that Alexander McQueen was designing Kate Middleton‘s dress stay secret? A lot of the people who were working on it were told that it was a costume for a film. The lace-makers believed they were working on a dress for a British period drama. [Vogue UK]
• Salma Hayek is really excited about her beauty line for CVS, Nuance, which launches in August. Hayek says the products include ingredients used by the women in her family, including her grandmother, a cosmetologist who studied in Paris. She says the collection has taken almost six years to bring to fruition: “I took three years off my [acting] career to work on this. This is not something that required 14 hours. Nooo, baby. This has been a full-time job.” Why partner with a mass-market store, rather than one of the many luxury brands her husband, François-Henri Pinault, owns? Prestige beauty suppliers are uppity: “When you deal with prestige suppliers there are only a couple that make the products for everyone. You are offered the cream that they didn’t already offer to Estée Lauder and [L’Oréal]. [For Nuance] I am dealing with many, many labs and suppliers who are hungry for the business and who didn’t mind some crazy Mexican coming to them over and over and over again asking them to change something.” [WWD]
• New York City’s Danziger Projects gallery is hosting an exhibition entirely dedicated to Kate Moss. It features the work of Herb Ritts, Chuck Close, and Annie Leibovitz, as well as a set of previously unpublished pictures of Moss from the year before she was photographed by Corinne Day for The Face and thus launched on her path to total world domination. (So, we’re talking like 13-year-old Kate Moss, we suppose.) [Elle]
• Sixteen-year-old Zimbabwean model Nyasha Matonhodze: “My dad always taught me the Christian way of life. And for my mother, she was a single mother at 18 who moved to London without knowing anyone. She’s always worked hard and seeing her overcome so much in life has been an inspiration for me.” [The Cut]
• Steve Madden had a great first quarter: Same-store sales rose 12% over last year, and net income rose 16%, to $17.9 million. [WWD]
• Ermenegildo Zegna is also surging. Profits tripled to nearly $80 million, and sales topped $1 billion last year. [WWD]
• Brunello Cucinelli, who styles himself as a philosopher-king who happens to run a cashmere and luxury goods company, is talking about going public via an IPO. [WWD]