Victoria's Secret Models and the New Supermodel Standard

The Angels designation Victoria's Secret introduced in 1997 and refined across the next twenty-one years of annual fashion-show production has had a more lasting impact on the working supermodel industry than the cultural conversation about the 2018 cancellation and 2024 reset has typically credited. The Angels system was the first model-celebrity-licensing operation at scale. It demonstrated that runway visibility could translate into multi-platform commercial leverage across television, beauty contracts, fragrance, and licensing, and it shaped the commercial expectations the working roster has been operating under ever since. The 2018 show cancellation, the cultural shift away from the narrow Angel aesthetic, and the 2024 reset with the VS Collective have not erased the template; they have repositioned the identity it runs inside.

This piece is a working profile of who the Angels were across the brand's full operating history, what the four-Angel commercial peak (Tyra Banks, Gisele Bundchen, Heidi Klum, Adriana Lima from roughly 1999 through 2010) produced for the broader industry, why the 2018 show ended, what the 2024 reset has produced, and what the cumulative legacy means for the supermodel standard the working industry now operates inside.

The Angels designation and how it functioned

The Angels framework launched in 1997 with a small initial cohort (Stephanie Seymour, Karen Mulder, Daniela Pestova, Helena Christensen, Tyra Banks added in 1997) and was formalised with the 1998 advertising campaign that introduced the Angels-branded marketing platform. The 1999 cohort expansion added Gisele Bundchen, Heidi Klum, and Inés Rivero to the line-up; the early-2000s cohort added Adriana Lima (1999/2000 promotion), Karolína Kurková (2005), Selita Ebanks (2005), and Alessandra Ambrosio (2004 promotion); the late-2000s and 2010s cohort included Miranda Kerr (2007–2013), Doutzen Kroes (2008–2014), Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (2009–2010), Candice Swanepoel (2010–2018), Behati Prinsloo (2009–2017), and Lily Aldridge (2010–2018).

The 2015–2018 expansion period added the largest Angels class in the brand's history (Lais Ribeiro, Romee Strijd, Sara Sampaio, Jasmine Tookes, Taylor Hill, Stella Maxwell, Martha Hunt, Elsa Hosk, Josephine Skriver), as the brand attempted to scale the Angels designation alongside its broader retail expansion. The 2018 fashion show cancellation effectively froze the active Angels operation, and the post-2018 brand reset (which we will return to below) replaced the Angels designation with the VS Collective framework launched in 2021.

The contracts that ran underneath the Angels designation were structured carefully. The standard Angel contract ran two to three years with renewable options, included exclusivity provisions across the lingerie and intimates category, scheduled the annual runway show plus three to five campaign cycles per year, and paid annual fees that ranged from $250,000 for newer Angels to over $1 million for the senior roster. The longest Angel tenures (Adriana Lima at nineteen years from 1999 to 2018, Alessandra Ambrosio at thirteen years from 2004 to 2017, Heidi Klum at eleven years from 1999 to 2010, Candice Swanepoel and Behati Prinsloo and Lily Aldridge at eight years each) sat well above the industry-standard contract length and produced the long-term commercial relationships that defined the brand's identity.

For the broader fashion-show production history that surrounded the Angels framework, our Victoria's Secret fashion show history covers the full operating arc from the 1995 Plaza Hotel debut through the 2018 cancellation and the 2024 reset.

The four-Angel commercial peak

The 1999 to 2010 period, which the industry has come to call the four-Angel commercial peak, was the decade during which Tyra Banks, Gisele Bundchen, Heidi Klum, and Adriana Lima collectively defined the brand's identity. The four held the senior positions across the cohort, anchored the runway shows, fronted the major campaign cycles, and produced the multi-platform commercial work that set the template. Tyra Banks's 1997 to 2005 tenure positioned her as the brand's first major Black Angel and established that the Angel position could translate into a broader celebrity-platform career; her America's Next Top Model launch in 2003 ran in parallel with the continuing Victoria's Secret work. Gisele Bundchen's 1999 to 2006 tenure established the international-superstar Angel positioning that the brand leveraged across global retail expansion. Heidi Klum's 1999 to 2010 tenure, profiled in detail in our Heidi Klum Victoria's Secret legacy coverage, established the multi-platform brand-extension template that the Project Runway hosting role and the Heidi Klum Intimates spin-off then demonstrated. Adriana Lima's 1999 to 2018 tenure, the longest in the brand's history at nineteen years, established the long-tenure career arc the brand subsequently positioned around her.

The Fantasy Bra format, which the brand launched in 1996 with the original $1 million Miracle Bra worn by Claudia Schiffer (a one-off pre-Angels production) and then formalised into annual production starting with the 1997 Diamond Dream Bra worn by Tyra Banks, became the major commercial press hook of the operating system. The format ran continuously through 2018 (when the show's broader cancellation ended the production), with notable Fantasy Bras including the 2000 Red Hot Fantasy Bra worn by Gisele Bundchen at $15 million (the most expensive Fantasy Bra in the format's history), the 2001 Heavenly Star Bra worn by Heidi Klum at $12.5 million, the 2003 Very Sexy Fantasy Bra worn by Heidi Klum at $11 million, the 2004 Heavenly 70 Bra worn by Tyra Banks at $10 million, the 2008 Black Diamond Fantasy Bra worn by Adriana Lima at $5 million, the 2010 Fantasy Bra worn by Adriana Lima at $2 million, and the 2014 Dream Angels Fantasy Bra worn by Adriana Lima and Alessandra Ambrosio (the first dual-Angel Fantasy Bra) at $2 million. The cumulative effect of the Fantasy Bra format across the twenty-one production years was to produce the kind of single-product press-hook framework that has since been adopted across the broader luxury-retail industry.

The musical-performance integration, which began in earnest with the 2001 New York show that featured Mary J. Blige and continued through to the 2018 finale with performances by Halsey, Bebe Rexha, The Chainsmokers, Rita Ora, Kelsea Ballerini, Shawn Mendes, and Leela James, became the second major operating element that distinguished the show from conventional runway production. The performance roster across the years produced the kind of crossover entertainment-industry visibility that conventional fashion-show production has rarely matched.

What separated the runway technique from standard catwalk work

The runway technique that the Victoria's Secret production demanded was meaningfully different from the technique required at the broader Paris, Milan, New York, and London fashion-week calendar. The standard fashion-week runway, particularly at the editorial-leaning houses (Prada, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta), demands neutrality from the model: controlled face, measured pace, body language that supports the clothing rather than competing with it. The Victoria's Secret runway demanded the opposite. The model had to command a long runway (typically 150 feet through to the 2010s expansion), in significant heels, under concert-level lighting, with large physical props (the wings, the embellished accessories, the elaborate costume changes), while smiling, engaging the audience, and synchronising with live musical performances.

The technique developed for this environment required specific physical capacities: longer stride length to cover the distance within the music timing; controlled upper-body carriage that could maintain authority while supporting wing accessories that could weigh up to twenty pounds; eye-contact discipline that registered across the broadcast camera distances; and the kind of stage-presence training that translated runway work closer to theatrical performance than to standard editorial walking. The most successful Angels (Adriana Lima's controlled-intensity walk; Candice Swanepoel's long fluid stride; Alessandra Ambrosio's warm-and-engaged carriage; Behati Prinsloo's irreverent stage presence; Karolína Kurková's classical-trained ballerina-derived line) each developed distinct walking signatures that the broadcast audience could read across the multiple seasons.

The training that produced this technique ran through dedicated coaching. Anita Bitton's casting work at The Establishment included pre-show coaching for several seasons; Adriana Lima's pre-show training with Michael Olajide Jr at Aerospace HPC included specific walk-conditioning protocols; the broader Angels community shared coaching infrastructure through trainers like David Kirsch who handled multiple Angels' pre-show preparation across years. The walking technique was not, in other words, a natural aptitude; it was a working skill developed through specific coaching infrastructure that the broader fashion-week calendar did not require.

For the broader walk-technique conversation that the Victoria's Secret runway sits inside, our coverage of Kaia Gerber's runway walk covers the contemporary supermodel walking framework that descends from the Angels-era training.

The 2018 cancellation and what produced it

The November 2018 fashion show in New York was the final show in the format's original twenty-one-year run. The CBS broadcast in December 2018 drew 3.3 million viewers, the lowest broadcast audience in the show's television history and dramatically below the 9.5 million viewers the 2014 show had drawn at the format's commercial peak. The L Brands parent company announced in May 2019 that the 2019 show would not be produced; the cancellation was confirmed as a longer-term reset in November 2019.

The factors that produced the cancellation were multiple and converged across the 2017–2019 period. The November 2018 Ed Razek interview with Vogue, in which the longtime VS chief marketing officer dismissed the idea of casting transgender or plus-size models in the show ("Shouldn't you have transsexuals in the show? No, I don't think we should") produced significant cultural backlash and signalled the company's distance from the broader cultural conversation about inclusion that the wider beauty and fashion industries had begun to integrate. The October 2018 MeToo-adjacent reporting around Razek's personal conduct toward Angels and contracted models, which produced significant subsequent reporting in The New York Times across 2019 and 2020, added a second pressure layer. The broader retail decline at Victoria's Secret's parent company L Brands, with the brand losing approximately 16% of its market share between 2016 and 2018 to newer competitors like ThirdLove, Aerie, and Savage X Fenty, added a third pressure layer.

The Razek departure in August 2019, the Wexner family's broader L Brands restructuring across 2019–2020 (including the spin-off of Bath & Body Works in August 2020 and the broader corporate reset under new CEO Martin Waters from February 2021), and the post-Wexner brand identity work across 2020–2023 produced the operating context for the eventual 2024 reset.

The VS Collective and the 2024 reset

The June 2021 launch of the VS Collective, which Martin Waters and the new Victoria's Secret leadership team announced as the replacement framework for the Angels designation, brought in an initial cohort of seven women selected to represent the brand's repositioning: gold-medal skier Eileen Gu, footballer Megan Rapinoe, actress and producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas, supermodel Adut Akech, plus-size model and activist Paloma Elsesser, photographer and activist Amanda de Cadenet, and Brazilian transgender activist Valentina Sampaio (already a Victoria's Secret model since 2019, the brand's first openly transgender hire). The Collective framework was structured as a 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.

The 2023 Victoria's Secret World Tour documentary on Amazon Prime Video, which featured a four-city fashion-show production (Lagos, Tokyo, Bogotá, London) with local designer collaborations and a deliberately broader casting framework, represented the first major attempt at a runway-format return. The 2024 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show return at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in October 2024, broadcast on Amazon Prime Video, brought back the original runway-show production format with an updated casting framework that included Adriana Lima walking as the senior returning Angel alongside Tyra Banks, Gigi Hadid, Alessandra Ambrosio, Behati Prinsloo, Lily Aldridge, Candice Swanepoel, Paloma Elsesser, Valentina Sampaio, Eileen Gu, Sara Sampaio, and Devyn Garcia (the trans Latina model who was the first openly transgender model to walk a Victoria's Secret runway-show production). The show drew significant broadcast attention but more importantly produced the operating signal that the brand had repositioned its runway production around a meaningfully broader casting framework.

The 2025 Spring show in May, the November 2025 fashion show at the Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, and the announced 2026 show production have continued the broader operating reset, with the casting framework continuing to expand across body size, ethnicity, and gender identity. The Fantasy Bra format has continued in modified form; the musical-performance integration has continued; the broader spectacle-of-spectacle production framework has held.

What the legacy means for the working industry

The cumulative legacy of the Angels system, across the original 1997 to 2018 run and the post-2024 reset, is more nuanced than either the brand's celebratory framing or the critical post-2018 framing has typically allowed. The system produced the working template that the supermodel industry has been running inside for the past two decades. It also produced the narrow casting standard the rest of the industry has since spent years correcting away from. Both observations can be true at once.

The template that translated runway visibility into multi-platform commercial leverage has shaped the post-Angels generation. Gigi Hadid's brand portfolio (Maybelline, Tommy Hilfiger, Versace, the Guest in Residence knitwear line), Karlie Kloss's Estée Lauder contract and the Kode with Klossy business, Kendall Jenner's brand-partnership work, Bella Hadid's Charlotte Tilbury campaigns and her Orebella fragrance launch, and the wider contemporary supermodel commercial picture all run on principles the Angels system established. The post-2018 supermodel generation has, in working terms, inherited the playbook even while operating outside the original Angels designation.

The narrower casting standard the original Angels system imposed has produced more measured industry consequences. The body-size narrowing across 2003 to 2015 (the visible average body-size shift toward smaller proportions across the active Angels roster), the racial-diversity limits across most of the active decades (the brand's Black Angels at any given moment rarely exceeded two or three), and the gender-identity rigidity through the 2018 cancellation produced cultural costs the industry has been working to address since. The 2024 reset has begun the correction; whether the Collective will produce the same kind of working template the Angels system did remains genuinely open.

For the wider supermodel-industry picture the Angels legacy sits inside, our industry insider guide to becoming a model covers the professional infrastructure, and our modeling industry business guide covers the commercial structure the licensing and brand-extension work runs inside.

A few quick answers

A handful of reader questions about the Angels and the broader picture recur. The most influential Angels across the brand's history are Tyra Banks (1997 to 2005), Gisele Bundchen (1999 to 2006), Heidi Klum (1999 to 2010), Adriana Lima (1999 to 2018, the longest tenure in the brand's history at nineteen years), Alessandra Ambrosio (2004 to 2017), and the post-2015 cohort that includes Candice Swanepoel, Behati Prinsloo, Lily Aldridge, and the wider 2015 Angels class. The cumulative reach across these careers extends from the brand's commercial peak into the contemporary supermodel industry. The Angels were different from other runway models because they were positioned as multi-platform celebrity figures rather than conventional fashion-week walking models, with commercial expectations including interview work, campaign cycles, fragrance partnerships, intimates licensing, and the kind of mainstream cultural visibility the broader fashion-week calendar did not generate. The show's history matters because it established the template for translating runway visibility into mass-market entertainment, demonstrated the commercial viability of model-celebrity-licensing at scale, and shaped the supermodel-industry conditions the post-2018 generation has continued to work inside. Aspiring models can still learn from the Angels-era discipline: the consistency that built the long careers, the technical runway training the broadcast environment demanded, the multi-platform commercial work the senior Angels built around their primary modeling careers, and the personality-and-presence skills that distinguished the most successful Angels from the broader casting pool.

The shorter version is that the Angels were the first systematic model-celebrity-licensing operation at scale, and the working template they established has continued to shape the supermodel industry into 2026 even as the brand itself has been substantially repositioned through the 2024 reset and the cultural conversation has moved past the narrower casting standard the original system imposed. For the contemporary casting picture the post-Angels supermodel industry now operates inside, our Victoria's Secret Angel requirements then and now covers the casting and contract evolution across the brand's full history, and our how to become a Victoria's Secret Angel covers the practical aspiring-model side.