The Spectacular Saga of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show

The first Victoria's Secret Fashion Show took place in August 1995 in a function room at the Plaza Hotel in New York, in front of a small audience of buyers, fashion press, and the company's own marketing team. Stephanie Seymour walked it. So did Beverly Peele, Frederique van der Wal, and Helena Christensen. There was no television broadcast, no Times Square billboard, no after-party in a borrowed mansion. It was, in the company's own internal language at the time, "a press preview", and the production budget was small enough that the lighting was rented from a downtown event-staging firm. None of the people in the room had any reason to think the format would survive past the season.

It survived for twenty-three years, mostly. Between 1995 and 2018 the show grew into one of the largest commercial television events of the year, generated billions of dollars of brand value, made household names of Adriana Lima, Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum, Gisele Bündchen, Alessandra Ambrosio, and the Angel roster that followed them, and ended in a cancellation that was as much a referendum on the company that produced it as it was on the show itself. The 2024 return, broadcast as The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show: The Tour, was a different format entirely, and it surfaced most of the questions the original show had spent a decade refusing to answer.

This is the long version of that arc, written for a reader who has seen the iconic clips and would like to understand the structure that produced them.

The Plaza pitch and the early years

The original Victoria's Secret Fashion Show was conceived inside the broader Limited Brands corporate culture of the mid-1990s as a press event, with a specific commercial brief: position lingerie inside the same conversation as ready-to-wear fashion, so that the company's seasonal collections could borrow editorial language from runway rather than catalogue. Ed Razek, then the company's chief marketing officer, drove the early format. He had spent the previous decade running marketing at Limited Brands and had decided that lingerie deserved a runway treatment in the way womenswear and menswear already had.

The first show in August 1995 ran for about twenty minutes inside the Plaza's Terrace Room. Stephanie Seymour opened it. The wardrobe was assembled from the existing season; there were no themed segments, no narrative arc beyond the loose grouping of pieces by colour story, and no music architecture beyond a single soundtrack mixed in advance. The press response was respectful, the order books in the days afterward improved, and the format moved into a second year.

The strategic shift happened in 1999. That year, the company live-streamed the show on its website, becoming one of the first major retailers to use the internet as a primary broadcast medium for a fashion event. The decision was made partly because the broadcast costs were a fraction of television and partly because Limited Brands had decided to use the show as proof that it understood digital before its competitors. The 1999 stream crashed the servers, drew more than 1.5 million viewers across its duration, and produced enough commercial signal that the company moved decisively toward television the following year.

The first television broadcast aired on ABC in November 2001, two months after the September 11 attacks. The audience that watched it (12.4 million viewers domestically, according to the network's own figures) was significantly larger than the company had hoped for, and the show became an annual primetime fixture inside the holiday programming calendar for the next seventeen years.

The early international experiments in Cannes (2000), Miami (2008), and Shanghai (2017) each carried a different commercial logic. Cannes was a positioning move toward the Hollywood crossover audience that was rising in the late 1990s. Miami brought the show into the brand's largest US retail market for new-store openings. The 2017 Shanghai broadcast, produced largely for the China market, was the moment the show's geopolitical complications first surfaced in public, with visa issues, partner cancellations, and a Katy Perry travel-document refusal that became its own news cycle.

The Angel system and the supermodel-pipeline logic

The Angel concept was introduced in 1997 as a marketing campaign for the company's Angels bra collection, with a roster that initially included Stephanie Seymour, Karen Mulder, Helena Christensen, and Daniela Peštová. Within two years it had become something more structural: a contracted brand-ambassador role tied to campaigns, store imagery, holiday marketing, fragrance launches, and the runway itself. The transformation gave Limited Brands a roster of recurring faces it could use across every product category and every advertising channel, and it gave the models attached to it a level of mainstream visibility that the editorial fashion calendar alone could not produce.

The roster that defined the Angel era at its peak read almost like a marketing-board diagram. Tyra Banks anchored the role from 1997 through 2005 and became the first Black model to wear the Fantasy Bra in 1997. Heidi Klum carried the cultural-celebrity register between 1999 and 2010. Adriana Lima walked her first show in 1999, was elevated to the contracted Angel position shortly after, and remained tied to the brand for nearly two decades. Alessandra Ambrosio held the title from 2004 to 2017. Behati Prinsloo, Candice Swanepoel, Doutzen Kroes, Lily Aldridge, Lais Ribeiro, Erin Heatherton, Sara Sampaio, Josephine Skriver, and Elsa Hosk filled out the roster across the years that followed.

The Fantasy Bra tradition, which began in 1996 with Claudia Schiffer wearing a million-dollar piece by Harry Winston, became the show's central coronation moment. The bra was usually unveiled in the middle of the broadcast, often with a separate musical segment, and the model wearing it was almost always operating at the peak of her year. Lais Ribeiro's 2017 Fantasy Bra was valued at two million dollars; Lily Aldridge's 2015 piece at two million; Adriana Lima's 2014 dual Fantasy Bras at the segment's most theatrical peak. The internal company language treated each appointment as a signal to the rest of the casting world that the model in question had moved into a different commercial tier.

The competitive intensity of the casting itself became one of the runway calendar's set pieces. By the mid-2010s, the November casting period in New York was the most-photographed audition window in fashion. Hundreds of candidates were reviewed across the major agency boards, internal company executives walked the final lineup decisions personally, and a confirmed booking could shift a model's market value across the following season. Even very experienced models treated the casting as a separate professional event.

For the longer reading of how that selection process and the broader Angel job description worked, our piece on Victoria's Secret Angel requirements then and now covers the structural side of the era in more detail.

Music, costume, and the spectacle architecture

The marriage of music and lingerie on the broadcast became one of the show's defining commercial differentiators. The 2001 ABC broadcast paired Mary J. Blige with Andrea Bocelli, a juxtaposition the company would never quite repeat, and used the segment as proof that the format could carry mainstream musical talent the way the MTV Video Music Awards could. From that point onward, the music budget became one of the largest single line items in the show's production costs.

The list of artists who performed on the runway across the next seventeen years reads like a programming summary of mid-decade commercial pop: Justin Timberlake, Mary J. Blige, Sting, Seal, Kanye West, Maroon 5, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, The Weeknd, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Selena Gomez, Shawn Mendes, Halsey, Harry Styles, Jay-Z. Some performances became their own viral cycles. The Weeknd's 2015 "Can't Feel My Face" performance, with Selena Gomez visible in the audience watching him, generated more social-media engagement than that year's runway segments did. Lady Gaga's 2016 multi-song appearance was used as the launchpad for the Joanne album cycle.

The costume design budget operated on similar logic. The wings, which had begun as a 1998 accessory and became the show's most recognisable visual element within two years, were produced in collaboration with Mr Pearl, Serkan Cura, and a small group of feather and prop specialists in Paris and London. A typical pair could weigh between five and fifteen kilograms, take three hundred to nine hundred hours of hand assembly, and cost the company tens of thousands of dollars per pair to produce. The Swarovski-crystal pieces, the floral sculptural pieces, and the mechanical wings that opened mid-walk were treated as one-time-use pieces in the same way couture pieces are treated at a Paris collection.

The theme architecture varied year to year, with segments built around concepts like "Goddesses", "Snow Angels", "Punk Angels", "Boho Psychedelic", "Exotic Traveler", and "Nomadic Adventure". The themes drove the prop budget, the music selection, and the set design in roughly equal measure. Internally, the company tracked the production as a single integrated marketing event whose budget was sometimes set at over twelve million dollars and whose downstream brand value was estimated, by the company's own marketing team, in the hundreds of millions.

The cultural cracks and the 2018 collapse

The contradictions that ended the show had been visible for years before they were named. The brand's casting through the 2000s and most of the 2010s was largely white, largely thin, and structured around a specific bombshell ideal that became increasingly out of step with both the broader fashion industry's casting conversations and the company's actual customer base. Public criticism of the diversity gap intensified through the mid-2010s; the company's response was incremental rather than structural, and the gap widened in public perception even as the casts began to include more Black, Asian, and Latina models.

The 2018 cancellation cycle began with Ed Razek's Vogue interview in November of that year, in which he stated that the show should not cast trans or plus-size models because "the show is a fantasy" and that the company was not interested in producing an inclusive version of it. The backlash was immediate and structural. Brand partnerships pulled out; talent began declining the casting; the 2018 broadcast in December drew only 3.3 million viewers, a fraction of the audience the show had pulled at peak. The company did not produce a runway in 2019.

The economic story underneath the cultural story was just as decisive. Ratings had been declining across most of the 2010s as broader television viewership fragmented. Online lingerie competition from ThirdLove, Aerie, Savage X Fenty, and the broader direct-to-consumer wave had started to compress the company's market share. The production cost of the show, at over fifteen million dollars in the final years and ten to twelve million at the average, was no longer producing the commercial return that had justified it in 2005. The cancellation was as much a cost decision as a cultural one.

Ed Razek left the company in August 2019. Les Wexner, the founder and longtime chairman of L Brands, stepped back from operational leadership through 2020 amid the broader scrutiny that followed Jeffrey Epstein's death and the surfacing of Wexner's prior professional relationship with him. Victoria's Secret was spun off from L Brands as an independent public company in 2021 under new leadership, and the strategic reset that had been delayed for most of a decade began.

The 2024 return and what it changed

The format that returned in 2023 and 2024 was deliberately not the format that had ended in 2018. The first piece of the reset was the VS Collective, launched in 2021 as a rotating ambassador group rather than a contracted Angel roster, with initial members including Megan Rapinoe, Naomi Osaka, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Eileen Gu, Adut Akech, Paloma Elsesser, and Valentina Sampaio (the first openly trans woman to walk the show, in 2019, and now a continuing presence in the campaign work). The Collective replaced the Angel system as the public face of the brand and made the previous casting logic structurally unworkable.

The 2023 Amazon Prime Victoria's Secret World Tour film, directed by Imma Asante and featuring designers from Bogotá, Lagos, Tokyo, and London, was the company's attempt to use the show format to repair its broader cultural standing rather than to sell lingerie directly. The film was not a runway show in the traditional sense. The October 2024 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show: The Tour, broadcast across Amazon Prime, YouTube, and the company's own channels, was closer to the original format but with an intentionally varied cast that spanned ages (Tyra Banks returned to the runway for the first time in nearly twenty years; Cher performed; Kate Moss made an appearance), body types, and backgrounds. The casting list also included Adriana Lima, Candice Swanepoel, Behati Prinsloo, Doutzen Kroes, and Alessandra Ambrosio walking alongside Adut Akech, Anok Yai, Precious Lee, Paloma Elsesser, and a new generation of faces.

The cultural reception was mixed in a way that was probably inevitable. The fashion press credited the company with structural correction; the broader cultural press treated the return as evidence that the brand had not fully metabolised the criticism that had ended the original format; the commercial press noted that early viewership data was strong but not at the peak levels of 2001 through 2014. None of these positions was wrong, exactly, although all three together describe a brand still in the middle of a reset rather than at the end of one.

The longer-term question is whether the new format can sustain itself commercially without the Angel structure that the company has chosen to leave behind. The early signal is that the company is treating the show as a marketing asset rather than a profit centre, which is a different calculation than the one Limited Brands made in 2001, and which suggests that the runway is now infrastructure for the rest of the year's commercial work rather than a peak event in its own right.

What the show changed about the modeling industry

The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show's legacy inside the industry is harder to summarise than its viewership numbers suggest. Its clearest structural contribution was making the Angel system into a working template for how brands could turn modeling contracts into year-round commercial assets, rather than a sequence of one-off campaigns. The post-2010 expansion of ambassador roles across L'Oréal, Estée Lauder, Maybelline, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Tiffany, and most of the major beauty houses borrowed directly from the Angel playbook, and models began signing multi-year deals tied to campaign, store, social, and event presence in ways that were not common before the Victoria's Secret model.

Underneath that, the show formalised the supermodel-as-intellectual-property logic that the 1990s had begun. A face like Adriana Lima's was, after a decade with the brand, a contracted asset with measurable commercial value across categories, in a way that not even Cindy Crawford's Pepsi or Revlon deals quite anticipated. The longer talent contracts now standard at the top of the beauty industry are direct descendants of that arrangement.

The more cautionary part of the legacy runs in the opposite direction. The show's eventual cancellation, and the public criticism that drove it, accelerated a broader correction in the industry's casting practices around body diversity, race, and representation that had been delayed for years. The 2018 Razek interview was a single trigger; the underlying movement was already in motion, and the post-2018 casting changes at major houses including Versace, Balmain, Coperni, Mugler, and Coach were partly responses to the same cultural pressure the Victoria's Secret format had failed to absorb.

For a reading of how the contemporary brand actually reads model candidates inside the new format, our piece on how to become a Victoria's Secret Angel covers the practical roadmap in the post-2021 era.

A few quick answers

A handful of reader questions about the show recur. The runway ran from August 1995 to December 2018 in its original format, broadcast on ABC and later on CBS, with the cancellation announced in May 2019; the Tour-format reboot launched in 2023 with the Prime documentary film and the 2024 runway broadcast. The most-celebrated Angels included Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum, Gisele Bündchen, Adriana Lima (who walked for nineteen consecutive seasons through to 2018), Alessandra Ambrosio, Candice Swanepoel, Behati Prinsloo, Doutzen Kroes, Lily Aldridge, Lais Ribeiro, Elsa Hosk, Josephine Skriver, and Sara Sampaio. The show was cancelled in 2018 because of a combination of declining ratings, rising production costs, sustained criticism of the brand's narrow casting and body standards, and the November 2018 Ed Razek interview that crystallised the cultural opposition into a structural commercial problem; Victoria's Secret subsequently restructured around the VS Collective and the Tour format.

The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is not coming back in its 2010 form. The longer story it told, about how a marketing event can become an industry-shaping institution and then a referendum on its own commercial logic, is more useful to read carefully than the highlight reel suggests. For the broader career architecture behind any aspirational reading of the era, our industry insider guide to becoming a model covers the foundations that the post-Angel system is still being built on.