At Steiner Studios, Brooklyn, on October 15, 2025, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2025 returns to the stage with a show in six segments. Additionally, the show’s soundtrack is composed entirely of female music. Under the leadership of Hillary Super and Adam Selman, Jasmine Tookes opens, pregnant, while Angel Reese and Suni Lee recall the entry of athletes. The stated goal: to marry heritage and inclusion, to revive a shaken icon without denying the show.
Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2025: a grand return to Brooklyn
Steiner Studios, located in the heart of Brooklyn, still vibrates with the bass and recorded screams on October 15, 2025. Moreover, these recordings took place early on October 16 in Europe. Victoria’s Secret has renewed its in-house "show," orchestrating a ballet of lights and monumental wings. Additionally, cameras were everywhere at once. The American brand wants to close one chapter, write another, and do it beautifully. The setting is familiar; the intention has changed, its leaders assure.
On the stage crisscrossed with rails and LED screens, Jasmine Tookes leads the way. Pregnant, she sets a calm, sovereign pace. The press will make it one of the evening’s strong images, as it sums up the show’s line: celebrating bodies as they come, without giving up the spectacular. Around, a fluid control room strings together the scenes, punctuated by live interludes. The audience mixes stars, photographers, and handpicked fans. Behind the polished staging, there is a desire to demonstrate that the format can evolve without denying itself.
Six segments, 100% female soundtrack: the new grammar
The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2025 was organized into six segments, announced in advance and picked up by the press: First Light, Bombshell, PINK Halftime Show, Hot Pursuit, Magic Hour, Black Tie. Each condenses a palette, an energy, a way of inhabiting the wings, historical signatures of the show. PINK’s "halftime" plays pop cheerleaders, "Magic Hour" modulates the golds and purples of the end of the day, "Black Tie" closes the evening with gala codes.
This choice of titling creates a reading for television: six "chapters," six moods, an easy-to-segment scenic continuum for the digital afterlife. "Black Tie" replays the US glamour DNA: gala polish, red carpet rituals, aesthetic reassurance. The "halftime" imports a gesture from the sports show: the intermission becomes the heart of the show, a hinge where the brand asserts its porosity with American pop culture.
The entirely female musical programming sets the tone and poses the discourse. In terms of meaning, the lineup asserts a narrative of female authority: not decorative "featurings," but headliners who hold the stage on par with the models. Missy Elliott paces the transitions with her stage authority. Karol G envelops the space with assertive sensuality. Madison Beer installs her contemporary crooner. And TWICE, a K-pop phenomenon, brings a choreographed fervor that triggers a wall of phones. The whole asserts, without long speeches, that the brand wishes to lend its system to artists. Thus, it offers its stage, its audience, and its digital channels to those who unfold stories of women.
When sport takes the stage
Two figures capture the imagination: Angel Reese, WNBA star pivot, and Suni (Sunisa) Lee, Olympic gymnastics champion. Seeing them walk signals an expansion of the repertoire: the performing, trained body joins the vocabulary of glamour. The media commentary highlights that it is no longer just about models, but also about athlete profiles. Moreover, these athletes agree to play the show’s part. The message here is as much about communication as it is about aesthetics: athletics and lingerie meet, like two grammars of movement.
Reese, with her competitor’s ease, turns the walk into a demonstration of presence; Lee, more focused, lets the precision of a champion shine through. The image is a statement: attraction is no longer assigned to a single morphology or a unique trajectory.
Returns of icons and new faces
The casting brings together the marks of the past and the promises of the present. Returning, as wise triumphant figures, are Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio, Barbara Palvin, Behati Prinsloo, Joan Smalls, Doutzen Kroes, Candice Swanepoel, Jasmine Tookes again, Gigi Hadid, and Bella Hadid. Also making expected debuts are Barbie Ferreira, Emily Ratajkowski, Yumi Nu, Alex Consani, Anok Yai, Paloma Elsesser, Ashley Graham, Imaan Hammam, Lila Moss, Iris Law… So many names that, for years, have shifted lines on inclusivity, sizes, and origins. Moreover, they influence presence on social networks.
The show’s editing – dazzling entrances, side cameras, sharp close-ups – juxtaposes these trajectories. It is well known that inclusivity cannot be decreed with lists, but the gesture is readable: Victoria’s Secret is keen to show itself as diverse, and to make it a proof by the stage.
A star-studded room, a much-commented absence
The front row displays its landmarks: Sarah Jessica Parker, Jodie Turner-Smith, Law Roach, Patrick Schwarzenegger, and other figures from cinema, style, and pop culture. Behind the scenes, the ballet of arrivals and departures is already fueling the networks.
One name, however, circulates for its absence: Kendall Jenner. Neither on the podium nor in the room. The day before, she was photographed in Dallas at a marketing event for her brand 818 Tequila, immersed in the atmosphere of the Texas-OU game; a schedule that explains why she was not seen at Steiner Studios. These discrepancies also tell of the current porosity between fashion, celebrity business, and local activations.
Artistic direction under a new deal
For several seasons, Victoria’s Secret has been thinking about rebuilding its image. The brand displays a clear chain of responsibility: Hillary Super, CEO, and Adam Selman, executive creative director, lead the repositioning.
With Selman, the grammar remains pop and readable: bold colors, silhouettes that flirt with club culture, Y2K nods distilled without pastiche. You can feel the hand of a stylist accustomed to mainstream scenes, aware that the show is not fashion week and that the equation here combines mass visibility and brand storytelling. The wings – historical totems – reinvent themselves as character accessories: less imposing, more scenic, sometimes almost graphic. The whole draws a compromise: keep the icon, remove the ideology of the "perfect body."
Hillary Super claims a course: to regain the status of "the sexiest brand in the world." She also wants to "reflect it back to the world we see," in other words, by reflecting the diversity of audiences. The formula, deliberately paradoxical, embraces the constraints of the time: to make a spectacle, but to respond to the objections – social, cultural, commercial – that have put the brand in difficulty.
From controversy to method: how to rewrite a show
Let us recall without emphasis the controversies that have fueled the disenchantment: young audiences targeted by an aesthetic deemed stereotypical, long-criticized lack of diversity, critiques of a triumphant male gaze. The brand has explored alternatives, such as an anthology-style film and "activist" muses. It has also made a corporate shift towards a committee of advisors. However, it has returned to the scenic format that made its glory.
The 2025 vintage thus advances as a test chapter: the named segments, the 100% female soundtrack, the presence of athletes and varied morphologies compose a narrative of renewal. The caution of the editing is perceptible: nothing radical, many signs. It is the nature of global mass-market brands: to adjust, more than to overturn.
The result, that evening, lies in a series of images: Tookes’ walk, the scarlet cape-wings of Bella Hadid, the visible camaraderie between artists and models, a room where you meet as many stylists as TV icons. So many instantly shareable cards, ready for the social feeds of the next day.
What we saw, what we didn’t see
We saw: a televisual know-how returned to its level, lighting that serves the garment more than it crushes it, a tempo without downtime. We saw different bodies in the same harmony, a sign of a casting designed for addition rather than demonstration. We saw female artists holding the stage, without being reduced to decorative punctuation.
We saw less: major stylistic risks. The lingerie remains in a seductive and coded framework, between sparkling satin and over-stylized micro-bikinis. In terms of narration, the argument of inclusion fits within the framework of global entertainment – effective, but not very questioning. The limits are real: a show does not remake a brand culture in one evening, and the commercial angle remains primary.
Reception and dissemination
The evening was designed for its digital afterlife. Platforms and media relayed, with vertical capsules, each notable entry. The segments, titled like episodes, lend themselves to virality. The setup reminds us that the economy of a Victoria’s Secret show today relies as much on capture as on the room: the global audience experiences the show in its timeline.
The casting contributes to this strategy: associating names that circulate beyond the fashion circle, whether they are champions, historical top models, series faces, or icons of global pop. The effect is cumulative: several fanbases aggregate their attention, the show plays the ecosystem, and the brand capitalizes on the noise thus produced.
Memory versus present: the 2025 bet
Leaving Steiner Studios, there remains a feeling of fine-tuning. Victoria’s Secret strives to translate its heritage in a less univocal way. This heritage includes chic kitsch, feather choreography, and the pink party. The gesture of inclusion is not an end, rather a method: the expansion of the casting, the presence of athletes, the support of recognized female artists.
The future will tell if this method infuses into the product, the stores, the daily communication. This is where credibility is played out: in the prolonged coherence, far from the spotlight. For now, on October 15, 2025, the brand has offered a readable narrative: to return with its symbols, open a few windows, and leave it to the public – vast, multiple – to arbitrate. It remains to be demonstrated that this grammar infuses the product and communication sustainably: this is where the credibility of the shift will be measured.