The Victoria Secret Fashion Show 2025

The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is back, and this time it brought everyone. The show featured OG bombshells like Jasmine Tookes, Adriana Lima, as well as Gen Z supers Anok Yai and Alex Consani, WNBA player Angel Reese, Olympic gold medallist Suni Lee, influencer Quen Blackwell, and It-girl-turned-actress Barbie Ferreira. And somewhere in all of this, amongst the feathers and rhinestones and spectacle, Victoria's Secret attempted to answer a question it's been grappling with since 2019: can you bring back something that defined an era without dragging all its baggage along with it?

The clothes, though!

Let's talk about what actually matters: the looks. Because whilst the cultural conversation around Victoria's Secret has become increasingly complicated, the show has always been, fundamentally, about clothes that make you stop scrolling. Jasmine Tookes opened the show in arguably the best look of the show (and my personal favourite) in a lattice style dress with teardrop shaped pearl gems which was befitting her clam shell cage

Candice Swanepoel brought glamour back to the VSFS runway as she made her much-awaited return at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show 2025 in a lace lingerie set. She first wore a black lingerie set, paired with a matching cape and lacy gloves, a dazzling garter belt, and huge dangling earrings.

Bella Hadid closed the 2025 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in show-stopping fashion, wearing a metallic fringed bra top and matching briefs, paired with oversized white floral-petal wings that reportedly weighed over 50 pounds (approximately 22.7 kg). Fifty pounds. The commitment to the fantasy remains unmatched.

The 2025 collection, designed by Creative Director Janie Selman, walked a careful line between nostalgia and innovation. The collection brought back early 2000s blowouts and giant conceptual Angel wings, some of which reportedly weighed up to 60 pounds, but it also touted dashes of ready-to-wear, like Alex Consani's silky red cargo pants and a few sheer crystal dresses. It's lingerie, yes, but lingerie that understands it exists in 2025, where the line between innerwear and outerwear has been thoroughly, gloriously blurred.

When angel wings changed everything

To understand why the 2025 show matters, you have to understand what came before it. The first Victoria's Secret Fashion show was held in 1995. It was intimate, relatively modest, nothing like the spectacle it would become. Tyra Banks debuted the first pair of Victoria's Secret Angel wings in 1998 with an all-white look that embodied the decade's minimalism. That moment changed everything. Suddenly, lingerie wasn't just functional or even just sexy. The show later made its network television broadcast debut on ABC in 2001, with subsequent years (2002–2017) broadcast on CBS. Suddenly, the show wasn't just for fashion people. It was for everyone. Families gathered round their televisions to watch supermodels parade in rhinestone-covered bras and wings that required engineering degrees to construct.

The Angels became household names. Gisele Bündchen, Jasmine Tookes Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio, Candice Swanepoel, these weren't just models. They were brands unto themselves, instantly recognisable, impossibly aspirational. The wings got bigger, the Fantasy Bras got more expensive (some topped $10 million), and the entire production became increasingly elaborate.

But the cracks were already showing. Television viewership of the show fell from 10.3 million in 2011 to only 3.2 million in 2018 before its cancellation the next year. The culture was changing faster than Victoria's Secret could keep up. What felt empowering and glamorous in 2005 started feeling dated, exclusionary, and frankly a bit boring by 2018.

Cancellation, officially announced in 2019 amid declining ratings and sales and growing criticism, was influenced by both the reckoning of the Me Too movement, fourth-wave feminism. The show that once defined glamour suddenly found itself on the wrong side of cultural conversation. The narrow beauty standards, the lack of diversity, the entire premise of the male gaze determining what women should aspire to, it all felt increasingly uncomfortable.

In 2024, after a five-year hiatus, the show came back . It tested whether the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show could exist in a world that had moved on from its original premise. Could you have the glamour without the narrow beauty standards. The 2025 show suggests the answer might be yes, but it's complicated.. The casting is broader, more diverse, more representative of what beauty actually looks like in 2025.

The 2025 show understood that performance is as important as the clothes. Performers were especially stacked this season, with showcases from Madison Beer, K-pop group TWICE, and Missy Elliott. To close things out, Missy Elliott took the stage in characteristically dizzying and eye-popping fashion. Having Missy Elliott close the show felt significant. Not just because she's a legend (though she absolutely is), but because it signalled that Victoria's Secret understands its audience has changed. The show isn't just for the male gaze anymore, if it ever really was. It's for the people who grew up watching these shows, who have complicated feelings about them, who want the spectacle but with updated values.

In 2012, Rihanna wasn't technically a model walking the show, she was instead the musical performer in 2012, but her walk down the runway was still every bit worthy of being one of the most iconic of all time. These moments, where performers become part of the fashion fantasy, have always been part of what makes the Victoria's Secret show work. The 2025 edition leaned into this, understanding that the line between performer and model, between audience and participant, has always been delightfully blurred.

The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show has at last learned to combine inclusivity and sex appeal in a way that, implemented earlier, may have saved it from disgrace. The 2025 show feels like an acknowledgement that both things can exist simultaneously. You can have the over-the-top wings and the diverse casting. You can celebrate beauty without insisting it looks only one way. You can create fantasy without excluding people from it.

Written by Vanessa Twerefou