On Sunday, October 18, the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show returns, this time in Los Angeles. The show starts at 4:30 p.m. Pacific time and streams live on YouTube and across the brand's social channels, after two years in New York. It is the most public casting sheet in fashion: a single runway on which a model's past work is supposed to count, and this year the argument over who belongs on it began before a single wing was fitted.
Romee Strijd knows the show from the inside. The 31-year-old Dutch model walked it from 2014 to 2018 and wore the Shooting Star Swarovski look in the finale of the 2018 show. This year she tried to return. In two TikTok videos posted on Monday, October 12, she said she had trained through the summer, travelled to New York in September for a casting in front of the brand's new team, and then waited. Weeks passed with no answer. She believed she was on a maybe list, and on the Monday of show week, five weeks after the casting, she still had no decision, so she kept training, because bookings in this business can come together at the last minute.
A few hours later, a second video carried the answer. Her agency had confirmed it was a definitive no. Strijd said she asked why she had not booked the show and was told, in her account, "they thought you wouldn't fit in the show this year." She said an earlier update, relayed through the agency, had described the casting director as not there yet with her, with a decision promised before the weekend. The two accounts did not line up for her, and that, more than the rejection itself, was her complaint. Rejection, she said, is part of modelling, and that part was fine.
What she asked for was a straighter story, sooner. Strijd said she does not feel supported by her agency, that the weeks of not knowing brought real mental stress while she arranged training around life with two children, and that she does not think she will go through casting for the show again, preferring to keep her positive memories of it. In the comments on her video, Frida Aasen, who walked the show in 2017 and 2018, said her own casting had also ended in a no. Two veterans, one runway, and a process neither of them could read from the inside.
Against that closed door, the brand has built a very public open one. Victoria's Secret ran open casting calls in cities across the United States this year, and chief creative officer Adam Selman travelled with the search. The process became Angels Among Us, a docuseries on YouTube following the contenders through auditions, training and fittings. The brand has said the search drew more than 100,000 entries. Its prize is the full professional package: the winner walks in Sunday's show and signs a one-year contract with IMG Models, the same agency infrastructure a working model spends years trying to reach.
The rest of the cast sheet is the opposite of unknown. The brand's official list, reported this week, runs to 16 names, with updates still expected as show day nears. Among those confirmed across reports are Adriana Lima and Candice Swanepoel from the show's defining era, Liu Wen and Imaan Hammam, and Gigi Hadid, alongside Ashley Graham, Paloma Elsesser, Anok Yai, Alex Consani, Grace Elizabeth and Devyn Garcia. It is a cast built from memory and momentum at once: faces the audience already trusts, next to the one face nobody knows yet.
The music follows the same formula. Victoria's Secret announced on September 29 that the performers are Megan Moroney, Megan Thee Stallion, Tate McRae and Katseye, an all-women lineup for the third year running. Selman told People he wanted this year "bigger and bolder than last year," and named the theme Fandemonium, a show designed to be entered and followed by fans long before it airs. The Weekly Ticket Drop even lets fans win seats, turning the audience into part of the cast announcement.
Which leaves the trade with two casting systems running side by side. One is a televised funnel, 100,000 hopefuls narrowed to a single debut, every step of it published. The other is the old machinery: a September casting room, an agency passing messages in both directions, and a maybe list that can hold a veteran of five shows for five weeks without a word she can plan around. Sunday's runway will show the first system at its best. Strijd's two videos are the record of the second, and they make the simplest case in the business: a no is a professional answer, but silence is not.
