Valentina Sampaio Became the First Transgender Model of Victoria's Secret

The Valentina Sampaio trajectory through the contemporary modeling industry has run as a series of historic-first moments, each of which was structured carefully by the agencies, magazines, and brands involved rather than as a series of accidents. The Brazilian model, born December 4, 1996 in Aquiraz, Ceará in northeastern Brazil and openly transgender from childhood (her parents accepted her gender identity when she was eight, and she lived openly as a girl from primary school onward), was discovered by a L'Oréal Paris stylist in São Paulo in 2014 at seventeen, signed with Way Model Management in Brazil that same year, became the first openly transgender model on the cover of Vogue Paris in March 2017 at twenty, joined Victoria's Secret as the brand's first openly transgender model in August 2019, appeared in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue as the first openly transgender model on the franchise's roster in July 2020, was named part of the VS Collective in 2021, and walked the returning Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in Brooklyn in October 2024 as part of the brand's broader operating reset.

This piece is a working profile of how the trajectory actually unfolded, what each of the historic-first moments produced for the broader industry, and how the operating template Sampaio's career has built has reshaped the broader contemporary casting conversation.

The 2014 discovery and the Way Model Management signing

The discovery happened in São Paulo in 2014 through a relatively conventional path. Sampaio had moved from Aquiraz to the larger city in early 2014 at seventeen to pursue modeling, with the family's support, and was working in retail and modeling-school environments when she was photographed by a L'Oréal Paris stylist working on the Brazilian market. The stylist passed her photographs to Way Model Management's Brazilian roster development team, who signed her shortly afterward. The first booking, a Brazilian music video in late 2014, was followed by domestic-market editorial work across 2015 (Vogue Brasil, Marie Claire Brasil, Glamour Brasil) and the L'Oréal Paris Brazilian-market beauty campaign work that the brand's local team booked her for across the 2015–2016 period.

The L'Oréal Paris work became the launching infrastructure for the broader international career. In March 2017, L'Oréal Paris announced that Sampaio would be the new global beauty ambassador for the brand, making her the first openly transgender model signed to a major global beauty contract in the brand's history. The contract structure ran across multiple product categories and produced significant subsequent visibility through the brand's broader campaign work.

The October 2016 Elle Brasil cover, which the Brazilian-edition cover team produced at age nineteen as part of the broader Brazilian-edition coverage of her rising career, was the first cover work that reached significant international visibility. The cover image (photographed by Brazilian photographer Bob Wolfenson) was widely reproduced in the international fashion press and became one of the more frequently cited examples of the Brazilian fashion industry's relative openness to transgender modeling work compared to the more conservative American and European markets at the time.

The March 2017 Vogue Paris cover

The historic Vogue Paris cover came under editor Emmanuelle Alt in March 2017, photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott as part of the magazine's broader thematic issue on contemporary representation. The cover was the first instance of an openly transgender model on the cover of any Vogue edition worldwide, and the issue itself was structured by the Vogue Paris editorial team as a deliberate cultural statement about the magazine's positioning on representation.

The decision was not, in production terms, an unusual one for Vogue Paris under Alt's editorship. The magazine had positioned itself across the 2010s as more politically engaged than many of its sister Vogue editions, and the broader French editorial environment had been more open to transgender modeling work since the 2014 Hari Nef and Andreja Pejić visibility moments in the wider international press. The Vogue Paris cover, in working terms, was the formal validation of the operating direction the magazine had been moving toward across the previous several years.

The subsequent cover work across 2018 and 2019 (Vogue Italia, Vogue Brasil, Vogue Mexico) consolidated the broader Vogue-network visibility. The IMG Models signing in 2018, which brought Sampaio into the American representation infrastructure for the first time, was the major operating change that positioned her for the Victoria's Secret contract that came the following year.

The 2019 Victoria's Secret PINK announcement

The Victoria's Secret PINK contract was announced in August 2019, with Sampaio confirming the partnership through her own social-media accounts before the brand's official announcement. The contract sat in a particularly sensitive operating context: the November 2018 Ed Razek interview with Vogue (in which the longtime VS chief marketing officer had dismissed the idea of casting transgender or plus-size models in the brand's runway show, with the now-frequently-quoted "Shouldn't you have transsexuals in the show? No, I don't think we should" line) had produced significant cultural backlash; the broader Victoria's Secret retail decline across 2017–2019 had pressured the brand's leadership toward operational change; and Razek's August 2019 departure from the company had cleared the path for the new operating direction.

The PINK contract Sampaio signed was, technically, with the Victoria's Secret PINK sub-brand rather than with the main Victoria's Secret operation, which the brand framed at the time as a deliberate operating decision to integrate the new casting framework at the more youth-oriented sub-brand level before extending it across the main Victoria's Secret operation. The campaign work that followed (which appeared across the brand's social-media channels in 2019 and 2020, the in-store retail merchandising, and the broader PINK-segment advertising) produced significant subsequent visibility and effectively closed the gap between the brand's previous public position and the broader cultural conversation that had moved past it.

The August 2019 announcement itself was structured carefully. Sampaio's own Instagram caption, written in both Portuguese and English, framed the moment as part of the broader cultural shift toward transgender representation in mainstream fashion rather than as a stand-alone celebrity milestone. The brand's accompanying statement acknowledged its previous casting positions without dwelling on the Razek-era specifics. The broader fashion-and-cultural-press coverage that followed treated the announcement as the formal cultural-political reset of the brand's identity, which is largely how the moment has been remembered since.

For the broader brand operating context that the announcement sat inside, our Victoria's Secret models and the new supermodel standard covers the full operating arc from the 2018 cancellation through the 2024 reset.

The 2020 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover and the VS Collective

The July 2020 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue under editor MJ Day brought Sampaio in as the first openly transgender model on the franchise's roster across its fifty-six-year history at the time. The shoot, which took place in Scrub Island in the British Virgin Islands in early 2020 before the pandemic shutdowns, produced a multi-image feature within the broader issue rather than the cover position. The follow-up 2021 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit work brought Sampaio back for additional shoots, with the broader operating relationship continuing across the subsequent years.

The June 2021 launch of the VS Collective brought Sampaio into the inaugural cohort of seven women (alongside gold-medal skier Eileen Gu, footballer Megan Rapinoe, actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas, model Adut Akech, model Paloma Elsesser, and photographer Amanda de Cadenet) that Martin Waters's new Victoria's Secret leadership team had selected as the replacement framework for the Angels designation. The Collective framework was structured as a broader brand-ambassador-and-advisory arrangement rather than as the runway-and-campaign Angels contract structure, with the women contributing across product development, brand strategy, and the broader cultural-conversation positioning the brand was attempting to build. Sampaio's role within the Collective has run continuously since the launch and has included substantial product-development and creative-direction input across multiple subsequent campaign cycles.

The post-2021 brand-portfolio expansion across the major luxury houses has continued through Versace (the Spring 2022 ready-to-wear campaign that brought Sampaio in as one of the featured campaign models), Balmain, Marc Jacobs, Schiaparelli, and the broader contemporary editorial calendar. The Vogue cover work has continued through Vogue Mexico (2022), Vogue Brasil (multiple covers across 2020–2024), and the broader international Vogue network.

The October 2024 fashion-show return

The October 2024 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, broadcast on Amazon Prime Video as the brand's first runway-format show since the November 2018 cancellation, brought Sampaio onto the runway alongside the broader returning Angels (Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio, Tyra Banks, Behati Prinsloo, Candice Swanepoel, Lily Aldridge, Gigi Hadid) and the post-Angels casting framework (Paloma Elsesser, Adut Akech, Eileen Gu, Devyn Garcia, and the broader contemporary roster). The Sampaio walk in the show was a featured segment that the brand positioned as part of its broader operating signal about the post-reset casting framework; the moment was widely covered in the post-show press as one of the more significant single moments in the show's broadcast history.

The 2024 fashion-show return effectively closed the operating circle that had begun with the 2018 Razek comments and the brand's subsequent operating reset. The Victoria's Secret of October 2024 was meaningfully different from the Victoria's Secret of November 2018; Sampaio's runway walk in the 2024 show was the formal cultural-political signal that the reset had been operationally completed, with the brand's casting framework now broadly aligned with the contemporary cultural conversation that the 2018 leadership had been positioned against.

The November 2025 fashion-show production at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, and the announced 2026 show production, have continued to position Sampaio as a featured cast member, with the post-2024 brand identity continuing to expand the broader casting framework. The operating direction that the 2019 PINK contract initially signalled has, by 2026, become the formal operating identity of the brand.

For the broader profile of the contemporary VS casting framework that Sampaio's career sits inside, our Victoria's Secret Angel requirements then and now covers the casting and contract evolution across the brand's full operating history.

The activism and the broader cultural framework

The activism layer that Sampaio has built around her modeling career has run continuously across the years and has shaped the broader cultural positioning the brand work has operated inside. The work with GLAAD (which named her one of the rising voices in transgender representation in 2018 and has continued to position her across the organisation's broader fashion-and-media programming), the broader LGBTQ+ advocacy work she has done across the Brazilian and international markets, and the public commentary across multiple interviews on the operating realities of transgender modeling in the contemporary industry have all positioned her career inside a broader political framework that her contemporaries have not consistently engaged with.

The personal life, which Sampaio has been more open about than most working models of her generation, has shaped some of the operating decisions. The continuing residence in Brazil (with significant work-time in New York and Los Angeles), the broader engagement with the Brazilian LGBTQ+ community, and the continuing professional and personal relationships with the broader Brazilian fashion-and-cultural network have maintained the cultural-political grounding that the international modeling career has run alongside.

For the parallel profile of another openly transgender model whose career has shaped the broader contemporary casting conversation, the Devyn Garcia trajectory through the 2024 Victoria's Secret runway production and the broader contemporary editorial calendar has continued in parallel with Sampaio's, with the two careers together representing the operating direction the broader industry has moved toward across the past five years.

A few quick answers

A handful of reader questions about Sampaio's career recur. She joined Victoria's Secret in August 2019 through a PINK sub-brand contract that made her the first openly transgender model in the brand's history, with the contract following the August 2019 departure of Ed Razek and the broader operating reset the brand's leadership had begun across that year; she was named to the VS Collective in June 2021 as part of the inaugural cohort of seven women and walked the returning Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in October 2024 in Brooklyn. She was the first openly transgender model on the cover of any Vogue edition worldwide, with the March 2017 Vogue Paris cover under Emmanuelle Alt as the formal first; subsequent Vogue Italia, Vogue Mexico, and multiple Vogue Brasil covers have continued the trajectory across the years since. The fashion industry response to her Victoria's Secret contract was substantially supportive, with the broader fashion-and-cultural press treating the August 2019 announcement as the formal cultural-political reset of the brand's identity; the previous Razek-era position had produced significant cultural backlash, and the operating direction the brand chose with Sampaio's contract closed the gap between the brand's previous public stance and the broader cultural conversation that had moved past it.

The shorter version of any of this is that Sampaio's Victoria's Secret legacy sits inside a broader trajectory of historic-first moments across the contemporary fashion industry, and the operating template her career has built has reshaped the broader contemporary casting conversation in ways that the post-2019 industry has been operating inside ever since. For the broader VS-Angels-era context that her tenure sits alongside, our coverage of the brand's full operating history continues in Victoria's Secret fashion show history.