Romee Strijd Signature Runway Era: A Defining Fashion Journey

Romee Strijd's signature runway era ran across a relatively narrow but commercially significant window, the 2014 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show debut at eighteen through the 2018 final show before the production was cancelled, with the formal Angel signing in 2015 falling inside the largest single Angel-cohort expansion in the brand's history. The Zoetermeer-born Dutch model, who built her career through the Code Management Amsterdam development pipeline before moving to Women Management and the IMG Models New York roster, has continued the working career across the post-2018 reset period through a combination of brand campaigns, the YouTube content business she launched in 2017, and the broader wellness-and-family content framework that the 2020 pregnancy announcement and the public PCOS arc helped establish.

This is a working brief on what the signature runway era consisted of, how the 2014 to 2018 trajectory shaped the rest of the career, and what the Strijd legacy means inside the contemporary supermodel cohort.

The Zoetermeer foundation and the Code Management discovery

Strijd grew up in Zoetermeer, the Randstad-cluster town between The Hague and Rotterdam in the South Holland province, where she attended the Oranje Nassau College through her early teenage years. The 2010 discovery at fourteen happened through a friend who recommended her to the Code Management agency in Amsterdam, the Dutch development agency that has run the foundational development pipeline for a substantial cluster of working Dutch models across the past two decades (Doutzen Kroes, Lara Stone, Mona Johannesson, and the broader Dutch-Belgian working roster all moved through Code or related development agencies during their early career years).

The Code Management contract that followed brought Strijd into the European development circuit across the 2011-2013 working years, with the early campaign work running through the Dutch and broader European retail-and-catalog circuit (the H&M campaign work that anchored the early years, the broader Tommy Hilfiger and Lacoste development work that began in 2012). The 2013 move to Women Management New York and the subsequent IMG Models representation positioned her for the major New York campaign work that ran across 2013 and 2014.

The October 2014 New York Vogue editorial work that the Conde Nast team commissioned around her sixteenth-month anniversary at IMG was the formal commercial debut at the editorial level, with the November 2014 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show debut in London following weeks later. The Strijd casting for the 2014 show was structured by the brand's development team as the pre-Angel evaluation cycle: the working precedent across the cohort was a one or two-year non-Angel runway cycle before the formal Angel contract extension, and the Strijd extension followed at the 2015 cycle.

The 2015 Angel-cohort expansion

The April 2015 Angel-cohort expansion announcement that included Strijd, Taylor Hill, Stella Maxwell, Sara Sampaio, Lais Ribeiro, Kate Grigorieva, Jac Jagaciak, Martha Hunt, Jasmine Tookes, and Elsa Hosk was the largest single Angel-cohort expansion in the brand's history. The brand's development team had been working through the broader Angels-cohort transition cycle across the 2014-2015 period, with the post-Doutzen-Kroes-and-Miranda-Kerr-and-Rosie-Huntington-Whiteley-and-Erin-Heatherton senior-Angels departure cycle producing the structural space for the largest single expansion the formal Angels framework had carried.

The Strijd positioning inside the 2015 cohort was as the senior-runway-elegance anchor of the expanded roster, with the broader brand-development team using her runway carriage and the broader Dutch-Vogue-editorial provenance to position her against the broader commercial-runway register the brand has historically carried. The 2015 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in New York was her first Angel runway appearance, with the runway carriage that has become the most-documented single technical element of her career visible across the broadcast.

For the wider Angels framework, our Victoria's Secret models and the new supermodel standard covers the brand's casting evolution since the 2018 reset. The 2015 cohort Strijd was part of included several other long-tenure Angels whose careers continued across the next decade.

The Lacoste campaign work and the broader brand portfolio

The Lacoste campaign work that Strijd ran continuously from 2012 through 2018 became the longest single supermodel-Lacoste collaboration in the brand's modern history. The campaign work crossed multiple seasons and product lines (the recurring polo-shirt seasonal campaigns, the perfume campaign cycles around the Lacoste L.12.12 fragrance line, the broader resort-and-casual collections), with the Strijd visual register matching the broader Lacoste contemporary-French-sportif positioning that the Felipe Oliveira Baptista creative direction was leaning into across the period.

The parallel brand portfolio Strijd carried across the Angel years included the H&M campaign work (running periodically from the early 2010s through to the late 2010s), the Tommy Hilfiger campaign work (running alongside the broader Hadid-and-Hill cohort across the late 2010s), the Free People campaigns (the boho-coastal register the Free People brand has continued to lean into), the Calvin Klein Jeans campaign work, the Macy's Tommy Hilfiger collaboration cycles, the Maybelline brand-ambassador work that ran briefly in 2017-2018, and the broader Vogue and Vogue Paris editorial calendar that the IMG Models team coordinated.

The runway portfolio across the 2014-2018 working years ran through Chanel (the recurring Karl Lagerfeld show season work across multiple cycles), Versace, Balmain (the Olivier Rousteing era show work across multiple cycles), Tom Ford, Givenchy under the Riccardo Tisci direction, Moschino under Jeremy Scott, Dolce & Gabbana, Anna Sui (the recurring spring-and-fall show work that Sui has continued to anchor across her career), Custo Barcelona, and the broader high-fashion-week calendar across New York, Paris, and Milan.

The runway carriage and the technical register

The most-documented single technical element of Strijd's signature runway era has been the recurring carriage-and-posture register that the broader fashion-press has read as the distinctive Dutch-supermodel-elegance positioning the brand had built around her. The stride length runs longer than the broader Angels-cohort average (Strijd's working stride averages approximately five feet at the broader runway-tempo, against the cohort average of approximately 4.5 feet), the shoulder carriage runs quieter than the broader cohort average (the working principle the runway-technique press has documented across her career is the deliberate refusal of the broader shoulder-rotation work that several of her cohort lean into), and the head-and-eye carriage runs the editorial-runway register (the deliberate refusal of the broader brand-runway smile-and-engagement framework that the more commercial Victoria's Secret runway register has historically supported).

The runway-technique press across the 2015 to 2018 working years repeatedly characterised the carriage as the "Dutch-Vogue runway register", the editorial-runway tradition that ran through Doutzen Kroes, Lara Stone, Karlie Kloss (who carries a structurally similar tradition through her German-supermodel foundation), and the wider Northern-European supermodel tradition that has historically supported a quieter and more architecturally spare carriage than the louder American and Brazilian Angel walk.

For the broader runway-technique framework that the Northern-European supermodel tradition has continued to influence across the contemporary working market, our Kaia Gerber runway walk profile covers the parallel American working-runway carriage that has emerged across the same period.

The PCOS arc and the public motherhood journey

The October 2018 marriage to Laurens van Leeuwen, the Dutch businessman she had been in a relationship with since 2008, ran across two ceremonies: the civil ceremony at Château de la Napoule on the Côte d'Azur and the Catholic ceremony the next day. The Angels cohort and the IMG Models roster attended. Their household has been based in Los Angeles since, with frequent returns to the Netherlands.

The June 2020 pregnancy announcement that Strijd made on the YouTube channel and through her Instagram presence ran one of the most-discussed individual fertility-and-motherhood arcs of the contemporary supermodel cohort. The polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) diagnosis that Strijd discussed openly across the broader announcement framework, the nutritional and broader functional-medicine work that she and Laurens had run for approximately two years before the conception, and the broader holistic-fertility framework she discussed across the YouTube channel and the broader podcast and editorial circuit positioned her as one of the more visible working-supermodel voices on the broader fertility-and-PCOS public framework.

The two children (Mint van Leeuwen born December 2020, Mick van Leeuwen born November 2022) and the post-natal recovery cycles have run across the YouTube content work and the continuing brand-campaign cycles. The 2023 and 2024 campaign work has run across the Dutch and European retail circuit alongside the continuing American working-market visibility.

The YouTube content business and the post-2018 framework

The Romee Strijd YouTube channel that launched in 2017 has become one of the more successful working-supermodel content businesses of the contemporary cohort. The channel has run continuously since, producing one to two videos a week across a lifestyle and wellness range: the recurring "What I Eat in a Day" videos, the fitness-routine documentation, the morning and evening routine cycles, the travel work between Los Angeles and the Netherlands, and the parenting-and-family content that the 2020 to present years have produced.

The channel's audience size, engagement, and sponsorship work have positioned Strijd as one of the more commercially significant working-supermodel content creators of the post-2018 stretch. The brand collaborations across the channel have run through the SkinCeuticals and broader prestige-skincare cycle, the continuing Lacoste and Tommy Hilfiger fashion work, and the wellness-and-supplement work the PCOS-and-fertility content has supported. The cumulative content business has produced meaningful career runway across the years.

For the working-supermodel social-and-content business, our Instagram modeling tips guide covers the contemporary social-and-content work the cohort operates inside.

The legacy and the broader cohort context

The Strijd signature runway era across 2014 to 2018 has been one of the more commercially significant short-Angel-tenure careers of the contemporary cohort. The Code Management Dutch foundation, the IMG Models New York representation, the 2015 Angel signing, the long Lacoste and Tommy Hilfiger campaign cycles, the public PCOS-and-motherhood story, and the YouTube content business have together produced a hybrid working template the rest of the post-2018 working-model market has continued to draw on.

The 2015 Angels-cohort expansion Strijd was part of (Taylor Hill, Stella Maxwell, Sara Sampaio, Lais Ribeiro, Kate Grigorieva, Jac Jagaciak, Martha Hunt, Jasmine Tookes, Elsa Hosk) produced very different trajectories after the 2018 cancellation. Strijd's position inside the cohort has been distinctive through the combination of the modeling work with the parallel content business, and the post-2018 record now suggests that the content-creator-and-supermodel hybrid she built across 2017 onward has been one of the more durable careers of the group.

For the parallel cohort coverage, our Taylor Hill Victoria's Secret legacy profile covers the younger-Angel track inside the same class, and our Victoria's Secret fashion show history covers the production-and-cultural arc her runway career ran on.

A few quick answers

Strijd's most substantive runway moment is the 2014 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show debut in London at eighteen. The formal Angel signing in April 2015, as part of the largest single Angel-cohort expansion in the brand's history, and the runway appearances across 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 consolidated the signature era. She has balanced the modeling career and the personal life through the ongoing campaign work, the YouTube content business that runs as a parallel revenue stream, and the careful integration of the maternity-and-postnatal cycles into the content schedule. The fashion brands she has worked with across the signature era include Victoria's Secret, Lacoste, H&M, Tommy Hilfiger, Free People, Calvin Klein, Maybelline, Chanel, Versace, Balmain, Tom Ford, Givenchy, Moschino, Dolce & Gabbana, and Anna Sui, with the Lacoste collaboration running across six continuous years from 2012 through 2018 as the single longest brand collaboration of her career.

The shorter version is that the Strijd signature runway era was a narrow but commercially significant trajectory that combined the Dutch foundation, the 2015 Angel signing, and the parallel YouTube business to produce one of the more durable post-2018 supermodel careers. For the entry tier of the same industry, our how to become a model industry insider guide covers the career-foundation work.