Tom Brady announced his retirement (again) yesterday. Immediately after his post went up on his social media channels, everybody on the internet thought about Gisele Bundchen. Because as we all know, his fake retirement last year resulted in their divorce. And since then Gisele hasn’t looked back. She kicked off 2023 with a new Louis Vuitton ad, she’s been seen in recent weeks on several photo shoots, there are rumours that she’s flinging with her jiu-jitsu instructor… 

 

Basically Gisele has flipped her hair, without even looking over her shoulder, not stomping away but sashaying away. And the comment she left on his retirement post is the social media equivalent of that visual: 

 

This is glorious. And it meets the definition of shade as illuminated by the Mostly Honourable Judge Kara Brown in her first session of Shade Court back in 2014 at Jezebel. As Kara noted at the time, the expression, “shade” or “shady”, has been misused and misrepresented. True shade is defined as follows by Kara: 

“True shade can make the receiver question the validity of their entire existence on this Earth while tapping into all their personal doubts. It's often a slow burn; if done correctly, you might not even realize you've been shaded until days later. You don't have to fully articulate the insult because the other person will be able to fill in the blanks based off of their own insecurities.”

This is what Gisele has achieved. Her comment is not openly hostile. She could never be accused of aggression here. In fact, the comment is exceedingly polite – which is why it’s so shady. It’s so polite that it’s impersonal. Polite and impersonal are not inherently offensive, of course. But when that person is your fresh ex-husband, with whom you spent over a decade, and the father or your children, the “your life” part is next level detachment. The detachment is what makes it so violent, as the kids say. Because indifference is the ultimate farewell. And a definitive answer to the question that kept coming up yesterday – whether or not she and Tom would get back together now that he’s supposedly retired, for sure for sure. 

Not that there should have been any doubt, but we have our answer now.