There's more to being a model than standing around all dead-eyed in a procession of impractically gaudy outfits while a European man with an unpronounceable name shouts a series of inanely useless instructions at you, you know.

Because it's a little-known fact that to be a model you also have to have several first-class degrees from the world's finest universities in everything from logical empiricism to advanced economic studies otherwise it doesn't count.

Luckily Gisele Bundchen has all of these qualifications and is therefore eminently capable of delivering sweeping statements about the condition of the world's currency markets whenever she feels like it. And that's what Gisele has done – she doesn't want to be paid in dollars ever again, partly over fears of its stability and partly because she probably overheard a bloody fashion designer's assistant say that coins are so last season and that seashells will be the must-have denomination once.

There is never anything quite as heartbreaking as when models get above their stations. Their role in life is to walk up and down a plank of wood dressed as a parrot or something so that people who'd start wearing baby intestines around their necks if a magazine told them it's what people are doing in Milan can stroke their chins and pretend they know what the fuck is going on.

That's what models do, and they can become hugely rich from doing it. But it's when models try to do other things that you should worry. When Cindy Crawford decided to become an actress she made Fair Game and was never heard of again, while thinking about stuff other than clothes and haircuts overwhelmed Naomi Campbell's brain to such an alarming degree that she started throwing telephones through people's skulls out of confused anger. And then there's Gisele.

Gisele Bundchen is currently the top-earning supermodel in the world, and yet in between her busy schedule of standing around in some red trousers for a while and then standing around in some green trousers for a while, Gisele has managed to decide that she never wants to be paid in American dollars again because she's concerned about the continued weakening of the dollar in the global marketplace. Or something.

It's been reported that when she signed a deal with Proctor & Gamble in the summer, Gisele demanded to paid in Euros – something apparently reiterated by her sister/manager Patricia Bundchen, who said:

"Contracts starting now are more attractive in euros because we don't know what will happen to the dollar."

And quite right too – not only are Euros more colourful than dollars, they're also smaller, meaning that you can fit more of them into your chichi Ripani handbag when you're meeting the girls for a night of pushing a single salad leaf around a plate and then vomiting the one molecule you actually put in your mouth back up into a toilet.

However, Gisele's move has predictably been taken as a personal insult by the sort of ultra-patriotic Americans who cry when people mention metric measurements and go home and curse for an hour whenever they see someone driving a Volkswagen instead of a three-mile-wide Cadillac that needs a billion gallons of fuel to get it to move half an inch. They're now calling for Gisele's American contracts to be cancelled and given to willing American models, like Barbara Walters or that Miss USA who took all that cocaine and shagged those blokes a bunch of times.

But you know what? Good for Gisele. She's proving that models are capable of intelligent thought, and it's thanks to her that we're following suit. We don't want to be paid in dollars any more either. Or Euros, for that matter. Or any kind of money at all. In fact, from now on we're only going to work for scraps of food. Scraps of food. Please. Anyone? We're so hungry.