Finally Victoria’s Secret is Out: It's a Woman’s World.

Sophia Leon S.

5 hours ago

8 min read

At the 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the women took the runway, the microphone, the fantasy bra, and perhaps something much bigger: the right to define what being a woman looks like.

I watched the 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show last night, and I kept coming back to one thought: where the hell were the men?

Not the men in the audience. They were there, of course, watching and cheering. Timothée Chalamet, for instance, was there to watch Kylie Jenner make her Victoria’s Secret debut. But the men weren't the spectacle. They weren't walking the runway or performing the music. For once, baby, the women were the whole fucking show.

The models walked, the women sang. Megan Moroney, Tate McRae, KATSEYE and Megan Thee Stallion made up an all-female performance lineup, bringing four very different energies to the runway. Country, pop, girl-group confidence, unapologetic sexuality. It was a reminder that femininity isn't one thing, and neither is female fucking powerrrrr. (Reuters)

And maybe it sounds dramatic to read so much into a lingerie show. I knowwww, I know! We're talking about women wearing beautiful underwear and wings while diamonds worth more than most people's houses bounce around on their chests... But I don't think it's ridiculous to pay attention to who gets to take up space, who gets to be celebrated, and who gets to define the fantasy.

I don’t know if you can feel it too, but the world we are living in right now feels like it's in the middle of a rather enormous shift. Women are questioning the relationships we're expected to want, the bodies we're expected to have, the careers we're expected to sacrifice, the ages we're expected to behave according to, and the extraordinary amount of energy we're supposed to spend making other people comfortable with our existence.

We're absolutely NOT asking for permission anymore. And we're certainly not waiting around for somebody to tell us we're allowed to want more.

What if what we're watching is the beginning of a woman's world?!

Not because the patriarchy has packed its little fucking suitcase and moved out overnight. Let's not get carried away here... There is of course still pleeeenty of work to do, and no fashion show is going to fix that. But there is something culturally significant about a stage where women aren't there to decorate somebody else's story. They're there to tell their own.

Women don't stop being women when they become mothers.

One of the things I particularly loved was seeing so many mothers on that runway. Women who have had children, built careers, lived entire lives outside the narrow little box society likes to put female beauty in, and then stepped back into the spotlight looking absolutely incredible, ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW??!

We can definitely stop acting as though becoming a mother means a woman has crossed some invisible border and is no longer allowed to inhabit the same world as the woman she was before…

I find it genuinely beautiful when women are allowed to exist in all dimensions at once. Not as a before-and-after story, or as a triumph over having somehow remained desirable after motherhood. Just as women who have continued living, changing, growing, working, loving, and showing up in the world.

And then there was the casting.

We saw women from different racial backgrounds, alongside models such as Ashley Graham, Paloma Elsesser and Devyn Garcia, bringing greater body diversity to a runway historically (yes we still remember) associated with an exceptionally narrow ideal. (Victoria's Secret)

I mean, was it perfect? No. One fashion show hasn't solved the industry's relationship with women's bodies. But it matters when the picture of what is considered beautiful becomes a little less restrictive. Representation shouldn't be treated as a revolutionary act forever, but when an industry has spent years selling women a veeery particular idea of perfection, making that idea less exclusive is worth acknowledging.

There was room for different faces, different bodies, different backgrounds, different stories. I just don’t think the point of inclusion should ever be that a few women are permitted to join the fantasy. I think, eventually, the fantasy itself has to get bigger.

And then Kylie Jenner walked out wearing a $50 million bra.

Now, I know there was plenty of controversy about this, A LOT! Some people felt the Fantasy Bra should have gone to one of the veteran Victoria's Secret models. Others questioned why Kylie Jenner, who built her career outside traditional modelling, was chosen to wear one of the most iconic pieces in the brand's history.

Personally? I loved it...

Not because I think Kylie is somehow more deserving than the women who have spent years walking for the brand, or because I don't understand why people were attached to the tradition. The Fantasy Bra has always represented a kind of ultimate status within the Victoria's Secret universe. For decades, it was the jewel in the crown, the thing you might spend an entire career working towards…

But I just loved the idea of bringing someone from outside that world into the centre of it.

Kylie made her Victoria's Secret runway debut in the $50 million Fantasy Bra, the most expensive in the brand's history and the first to return to the runway since 2018. The design featured more than 4,400 diamonds, including a 75.54-carat yellow diamond, and took 15 craftspeople more than 1,000 hours to create. (Vogue)

I mean, if you're going to bring back the Fantasy Bra, you might as well make a fucking event out of it, no?

But beyond the spectacle, I like what this choice could mean for the future of the show. Imagine if we stopped assuming that the Fantasy Bra must automatically go to one of the established Angels. Imagine if, every year, the brand invited someone entirely unexpected to wear it. An artist, an athlete, a performer, a woman who has built something extraordinary in another field.

Suddenly, we wouldn't just be waiting to see which model gets chosen. We'd be wondering who the hell could possibly walk out next. VS take notes, I am giving you a brilliant idea here!

And Kylie absolutely understood the assignment. She stepped into a world with decades of history and enormous expectations, and she made the moment her own. She didn't need to pretend she'd spent her entire life trying to become a Victoria's Secret Angel. She arrived as Kylie Jenner, and that was precisely the point.

Which brings me to something I've been thinking about for a while:

Victoria's Secret used to sell us an unattainable world.

Back in the day, the Angels existed in this almost mythical universe. The wings, the bodies, the enormous production, the Fantasy Bra. The women were beautiful in a way that felt almost otherworldly, and the show was designed to make us believe we were witnessing something very few people could ever access. I remember watching this show for the first time when I was just a teenager in absolute AWE!

The Angels weren't simply models. They were the fantasy.

And while that was undeniably part of the spectacle, it also created a very clear distance between the women watching and the women on the runway. There was the world we lived in, and then there was theirs. You could admire it, aspire to it, buy a little piece of it, perhaps, but you were never quite supposed to believe you could actually enter it.

This year, I found myself responding to something different.

Kylie wasn't a traditional Victoria's Secret Angel. She was a woman who had built her own cultural empire outside the modelling world. And alongside the established names, the brand introduced Solange Omon, a 21-year-old from Cameroon selected from thousands of hopefuls through the company's open casting programme, Angels Among Us. Her selection also came with a contract with IMG Models. (People)

Those are two very different journeys into the same world: one woman arriving with an enormous cultural platform of her own, another beginning a modelling career after being selected through an open casting process.

And I loved seeing both!

Because what if the new fantasy isn't that every woman can become Kylie Jenner, or that anyone can simply walk into a Victoria's Secret show. Obviously, there are enormous privileges, opportunities and inequalities that don't magically disappear because a casting call opens. I'm not interested in selling another version of the myth that hard work alone guarantees success, don’t get me wrong…

But I do like the idea that the world of the Angels doesn't have to be a permanently closed circle. That a woman can come from somewhere the industry wasn't necessarily looking and still stand alongside the women whose faces have defined it for years. That being an icon in one field doesn't mean you can't enter another. That established women can share a stage with those just beginning to find their place.

We don't need to destroy every fantasy that came before us. Maybe we need to make room for more women inside it?

And what if this is what female empowerment actually looks like?

Not another campaign telling us we're powerful while quietly suggesting we should all look, behave and live exactly the same way. Not another slogan about confidence printed on a product that profits from our insecurities. Not the idea that women must become more masculine, less emotional, less maternal, less sexual, or less anything to be taken seriously.

Just women being allowed to be more than one thing.

The mothers and the supermodels. The newcomers and the women who have been doing this for twenty years. The women with different bodies and backgrounds. The women making music, building businesses, raising children, earning money, taking risks and refusing to shrink themselves into a version of femininity that makes everybody else more comfortable.

And the men? They can be there, too. I really loved the idea of a man sitting in the audience, watching a woman he loves do something extraordinary, and being perfectly happy to cheer her on. Not threatened by her success, not needing to be the person holding the microphone. Just simply proud of her.

I don't think women becoming more powerful means men have to become less powerful. I think it means we stop assuming that one person's power requires somebody else's submission. We stop treating a woman's success as a threat to the natural order of things. We stop expecting her to make herself smaller so somebody else can feel bigger.

And perhaps, after generations of women being taught to look at themselves through somebody else's eyes, there is something insanely powerful about a spectacle in which the women don't simply appear to be desirable. They appear to be in charge of their own desirability.

Now, okay, OKAAYYY, I know it's just a fashion show... I know it's a commercial production designed to sell lingerie, generate headlines and give the internet something to argue about for the next forty-eight hours.... I'm not suggesting Victoria's Secret has suddenly become a feminist organisation because it hired four female performers and put more types of women on a runway.

But sometimes culture tells us something before we have quite figured out how to articulate it ourselves, wouldn’t you agree?

Watching those women take over that stage, I thought maybe we're becoming less interested in being invited into somebody else's world. Maybe, FINALLY we're building our own?!

A world where women don't have to choose between being mothers and being beautiful, between being successful and being loved, between being feminine and being powerful, between supporting one another and standing out individually.

A world where a woman can walk alongside the Angels without needing to become an entirely different person to deserve the wings. And where the men who love her can sit in the audience, look up at her, and cheer. Because, for once, they don't need to be the show. Cuz the women are the fucking show.