Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2026 brings back the Angel, minus the Angel contract

Victoria’s Secret once said its Angels no longer belonged to the culture. This year’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, streamed free from a studio lot in Culver City, is built to end with the brand naming a new one, picked from an open casting call and filmed for a YouTube docuseries, while a diamond Fantasy Bra returns to the runway after an eight-year absence. The wings never really left. What comes back now is the word.

Our reading: the comeback is real, and it is also a conversion. An Angel used to be a job, a contracted spokesmodel whose face carried the campaigns and, for a few women, a fortune. The new Angel is a prize at the end of a shoppable casting show, and “anyone can be an Angel” is, quite literally, a YouTube video filter. Victoria’s Secret has kept the halo and dropped the payroll. That is not a scandal. It is a business model, and the audience should watch the show as one.

It matters beyond the runway because the people pressing play are part of the machinery. The livestream carries product tags, creators earn commissions on what they tag, and the fan who films herself in digital wings is doing marketing the brand used to pay supermodels to do. The fantasy used to be something you looked at. Now it is something you join, and joining comes with a checkout button.

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From “not culturally relevant” to an open casting call

The turn is sharper than the nostalgia coverage admits. In 2021, then chief executive Martin Waters told The New York Times that the company had misread its moment: “When the world was changing, we were too slow to respond.” He went further: “We needed to stop being about what men want and to be about what women want.” The Angels were replaced by the VS Collective, a group of ambassadors that included Megan Rapinoe, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Eileen Gu, Paloma Elsesser and Valentina Sampaio. Waters, the Times reported, no longer saw the Angels as culturally relevant.

The televised show had already gone dark. Its last edition was in 2018, the year Ed Razek, then chief marketing officer of the parent company, gave Vogue an interview defending a narrow standard of beauty that turned into a reputational wound. E! News notes that the 2019 show was cancelled amid mounting criticism that the brand was stuck in another era. The show returned in 2024 in New York, with Tyra Banks leading the finale, came back to New York in 2025, and moves to Los Angeles this year, its first show in the city in nearly two decades.

The new Angel comes out of a process the brand calls Angels Among Us. According to WWD, more than 100,000 applicants were narrowed to three finalists: Andreína Martínez Fournier, a former Miss Dominican Republic; Tatyana Tinsley, a runway model born and raised in the Bronx; and Solange Omon, originally from Cameroon and now living in Maine. Castings ran in Chicago, Houston, Miami and Los Angeles, with chief creative officer Adam Selman and scouts from IMG Models choosing. The winner is set to be named on the runway and, WWD reports, receives an exclusive modeling contract with IMG Models.

The title comes back without the job

That last detail carries the argument. Historically, as WWD puts it, Angels were not simply models hired to walk; they were official spokesmodels who appeared in campaigns, promotional events and brand projects. The money could be life-changing. E! News recalls that Gisele Bündchen’s five-year contract, signed in 2000, was reportedly worth $25 million, and Bündchen told Refinery29 that the brand was “80 percent of my income” when she decided not to re-sign. Heidi Klum said the show made her “kind of a household name.”

Cosmopolitan, in a guide to who counts as an Angel, says only 41 models held the official title between its launch and its discontinuation in June 2021. The Angels Among Us winner, it adds, gets a year-long contract with IMG Models and a runway slot, and “won’t be an ‘Angel’ in the traditional sense.” The magazine’s conclusion is blunt: “chances are that there will only ever be 41 official VS Angels.”

Victoria’s Secret frames it differently. A spokesperson told WWD that the brand is celebrating Angel heritage “through a modern lens” and that “being an Angel is about celebrating individuality, confidence and that undeniable energy and authenticity that inspires others.” Read that sentence again. It describes a feeling. An Angel was once defined by a contract; the 2026 definition fits anyone. YouTube’s own guide to the show makes the point without irony: the platform says it has “made it so anyone can be an Angel” with a VS Angel Wings Effect on Shorts, and clips using the effect are eligible to be featured on the YouTube homepage. In 2021 the Angels were not culturally relevant. In 2026 they are a filter.

Why the show moved from Amazon to YouTube

The platform choice explains the format. Last year’s show streamed on Amazon. This year Victoria’s Secret is partnering with YouTube instead, and chief executive Hillary Super told WWD why: “Much more democratic, much more where the young consumer is.” She added that the connection between paid marketing and YouTube, all running primarily through Google, “is going to be very powerful for us.” Democracy, in this sentence, is a media-buying term.

YouTube’s guide spells out the plumbing. Viewers can shop through product tags while they watch. Creators get exclusive shopping hours the day after the show, so they can tag products in their own videos and earn commissions through YouTube Shopping. Super describes the logic as fandom: “we just hear so much from our consumer about wanting to be a part of it, wanting to see behind the curtain.” Elizabeth Preis, the chief marketing and customer officer, told WWD: “Everyone wants to feel like an insider.” The insider gets a tag to tap.

The numbers show why the company is leaning in. WWD reported that second-quarter sales rose 10 percent to $1.6 billion and that the company raised its full-year forecast to between $7.1 billion and $7.2 billion. Super was candid about the gap still to close: “We have around 25 million active customers. At one point in time, we had 35 million.” Building that customer file, she said, “is the flywheel for everything.” The show is not a tribute to the past. It is a customer-acquisition event with a soundtrack by Megan Thee Stallion, Tate McRae, KATSEYE and Megan Moroney.

The strongest case for the Angel’s return

The best defense of the revival deserves to be stated in full. The old Angel was exclusive by design, and the executive who embodied that design defended it in Vogue in the last year the show aired. The new route to the title runs through shopping malls and open calls, and its three finalists come from the Dominican pageant circuit, a Bronx portfolio and a Cameroon-born career built in Maine. The cast announced by ¡HOLA! includes Paloma Elsesser, Ashley Graham and Precious Lee alongside Gigi Hadid and Alessandra Ambrosio. Preis says the idea came from customers who wanted a way in. Hadid, speaking for the brand in a quote reported by E! News, put it simply: “It’s not what people think. It’s not just about lingerie and looking hot.”

And customers appear to agree with their wallets. Neil Saunders of GlobalData told WWD that Victoria’s Secret “isn’t just expanding spend among existing shoppers, but it’s also now attracting new ones,” reversing years of erosion. If women are coming back to a brand that once told them they were not its audience, a critic who calls that a regression has to explain why the women themselves are wrong.

There is a second camp with the opposite complaint. Cosmopolitan reports that some fans are angry that established Angels such as Romee Strijd and Lais Ribeiro were reportedly passed over in favor of celebrities and content creators, with some threatening to boycott. For that audience, the problem with the revival is that it is not Angel enough. Victoria’s Secret is trying to satisfy both camps at once, and the new title, open to everyone and binding no one, is how it does it.

Why the open door still belongs to the brand

The broader casting is real progress: a selection that, as WWD notes, historically took place behind closed doors is now filmed and open to applicants. But the critique of 2021 was never only about who walked. Rapinoe, speaking to The New York Times when she joined the Collective, described the old message as “patriarchal, sexist,” built on “what men desired.” Her complaint was about whom the show served. The 2026 answer is clear: it serves whoever is buying, and it measures openness in applicants and tagged products.

A contract was also leverage. Bündchen walked away at 27 from a deal that, by her own account, made up 80 percent of her income; that was a negotiation between a star and a company. The new Angel gets a year with a modeling agency and a title the brand defines as a mood. Victoria’s Secret keeps the name, the wings and the right to decide who wears them. Meanwhile the most 2018 object in the catalogue makes its return: Jacob Arabo of Jacob & Co., who designed the new Fantasy Bra, told Parade, “I wanted to create the most expensive Fantasy Bra ever made, but value alone was never enough.” The company that once said it had outgrown the fantasy is now selling it back with a record price tag as the stated goal.

What is on the record, and what is our reading

On the record: the show streams on Sunday, October 18, 2026, from Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City at 7:30 p.m. Eastern, free on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok and in 10 AMC theaters, according to ¡HOLA! and YouTube. The Fantasy Bra returns for the first time since Elsa Hosk wore it in 2018; Parade reports that its value has not been disclosed and its wearer had not been revealed. WWD confirms the three finalists and the IMG Models contract, and reported the second-quarter results cited above.

In dispute: whether the winner is an Angel. WWD’s headline says Victoria’s Secret is bringing the Angels back, and the brand’s spokesperson calls her “our newest Angel”; Cosmopolitan argues she will not be one in the traditional sense. Our reading, that the title has been turned from a job into a prize, is interpretation; the brand argues the opposite, and the sales figures are on its side for now. The winner’s name will be public once she reaches the end of the runway. The wings are back for anyone with a phone. So far, the Angel contract is back for no one.

Tags: youtube, supermodels, Fashion shows, Victoria's Secret, Victoria's Secret Angels, Victoria's Secret Fashion Show

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