Romee Strijd is back at the center of Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show casting drama this weekend in Los Angeles. The debate lands just as the show tries to keep its 2024 comeback from getting swallowed by the same old questions about who gets invited back and why.
October 14, 2026 brought the latest round of scrutiny, with the discussion circling a model who became emblematic of the 2010s Victoria’s Secret look. Strijd also became a star in her own right through vlogs that followed her adventures as a VS angel, which gave her a public identity beyond the runway.
Romee Strijd and the VS angle
2015 is the reference point that still shapes the conversation: Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid were cast in their first VS show that year, when the brand was already leaning into a newer kind of runway attention. That shift matters because Victoria’s Secret once sat on top of the fashion conversation, then fell behind debates about inclusivity and body positivity.
The brand’s return in 2024 after a six-year hiatus was meant to reset the frame. Tyra Banks came back as a closer, which signaled that Victoria’s Secret still wanted familiar runway names to carry the show’s biggest beats.
Victoria’s Secret casting culture
The Strijd debate fits the old pattern. Victoria’s Secret casting used to travel through Tumblr and Twitter as much as through the runway itself, and the current reaction shows that the audience still treats lineup decisions as part of the product, not a side note.
That is the friction here: Strijd became one of the emblematic Victoria’s Secret models of the 2010s, yet she is now being discussed in connection with being left out of this weekend’s show. For a brand that has been trying to manage both nostalgia and reinvention, that kind of omission becomes the story.
This weekend in Los Angeles
This weekend’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in Los Angeles now has an extra layer of attention before a single look hits the runway. If the casting holds, the message is plain: Victoria’s Secret is still choosing which parts of its old identity it wants to revive, and which names it is ready to leave in the past.
