The Angel Who Asked for an Answer: Romee Strijd, Victoria’s Secret and the End of the Polite No

LOS ANGELES — There is a particular silence in fashion that everyone who has ever cast, been cast, or waited by a phone knows by heart. It is not a no. It is the absence of a yes, stretched out for weeks, until the date passes and the answer becomes obvious to everyone except the person who has been waiting for it. The industry has always run on that silence. This month, one of its most famous faces broke it on camera.

Romee Strijd, the Dutch model who became a Victoria’s Secret Angel in 2015 and walked the finale of the 2018 show in 27-pound Swarovski wings, posted two TikToks the week before the brand’s Oct. 18 show in Los Angeles, The Daily Beast reported. In them she explained that she had trained all summer, flown to a casting in New York in early September, and then heard nothing for five to six weeks. Then she told her followers she was out.

“They kept me in the dark… Not knowing for so long… I got a lot of mental stress from it,” she said, per The Daily Beast. And then, the sentence that turned a casting decision into a cultural event: “I don’t think I’m gonna cast anymore in the future, because I don’t like the way it went.”

What the brand says

Victoria’s Secret’s answer was precise, and it is worth reading in full. A representative told Vanity Fair that the brand and casting director Piergiorgio Del Moro “communicated directly to her representation and formally released her from the casting process on September 6.” The statement added: “While we cannot speak to the communications between talent and representation, Victoria’s Secret values and respects all talent partners—past, present and future.”

Put the two accounts next to each other and you have the whole drama in a single gap. The brand says it said no on Sept. 6. The model says she was still waiting in October. Somewhere between a casting office and a phone call, five weeks of a person’s life went missing. Neither Strijd nor her agency, IMG, responded to Vanity Fair’s request for comment by its press time.

Then she kept talking

Here is where it gets interesting, and where it stops being a celebrity spat and becomes a case study. Vanity Fair’s José Criales-Unzueta returned to the story on Oct. 21. By then, Strijd had commented on Vanity Fair’s Instagram post and followed up with a statement. And a new date had surfaced: Strijd, Vanity Fair reported, did not attend the casting until Sept. 10, four days after the brand says she was released. Whether that is “a simple mix up regarding dates or a more complicated issue remains a mystery,” Criales-Unzueta wrote.

“I had been on option since early summer,” she said, per Vanity Fair. Then she laid out her request plainly: “If the decision was that I should no longer be considered, I would appreciate an explanation of what happened and why I still attended.”

They have every right to decide whom they invite or book, but after that preparation and planning, I think clear communication is a reasonable expectation.

— Romee Strijd, via Vanity Fair, Oct. 21

“I asked IMG for clarification but still haven’t received an explanation,” she said. Vanity Fair said IMG again had not responded, and Victoria’s Secret did not reply to a follow-up. Then came the lines that should be pinned in every agency in New York, Paris and Los Angeles: “If there is still uncertainty, say that honestly. Keeping someone hopeful because a decision might change isn’t fair when they’re making plans and putting their time and energy into something. That has always been my point.”

Vanity Fair’s verdict was blunt: “This is an age of social-media-induced radical transparency, and Strijd appears to be coming out on top by pure virtue of laying it all out.”

The internet’s jury

The public did not need persuading. Under one viral Instagram post, a fan wrote that “Romee wasn’t just a girl who walked the VS runway; she was an Angel,” and the comment drew more than 35,000 likes in under 24 hours, The Daily Beast reported. Fans in TikTok threads and Victoria’s Secret’s own comment section pushed for other 2010s favourites, including Taylor Hill and Lais Ribeiro, and complained about influencers being cast in their place, Vanity Fair noted.

Bethenny Frankel weighed in on TikTok, and one comment under her video, quoted by Vanity Fair, captured the nostalgia perfectly: “I love inclusivity, we need models that all look different, but there’s something ethereal about the early VS shows, every girl had that IT factor that’s what made it so iconic.”

The Daily Beast reported that some commenters also turned on celebrity offspring in the cast, naming Amelia Gray, and noting that Iris Law and Lila Moss had walked previous shows. It is the same argument that greeted the $50 million Fantasy Bra when it went to Kylie Jenner on show night. Fame, the fans say, is being cast ahead of the work.

The show that needed the drama

Here is the irony. The casting fight may have been the best thing that happened to the show’s visibility all month. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show returned in 2024 after a six-year hiatus, with Tyra Banks back as a closer, and the brand has spent the time since trying to marry nostalgia to a new generation, per Vanity Fair. The cast now mixes Candice Swanepoel and Adriana Lima with Alex Consani, Paloma Elsesser and Anok Yai. There is a YouTube docuseries about casting, Angels Among Us, featuring creative director Adam Selman. This year’s performers were Tate McRae, Megan Thee Stallion, Katseye and Megan Moroney.

Yet Vanity Fair observed that the internet seemed more interested in which 2010s models were missing than in who was there, and that Strijd’s posts “ignited interest in the show that did not appear nearly as fervent over the past few weeks.” Its kicker: “Maybe all press is good press, or maybe it is 2012 again after all.”

When the show finally aired from Los Angeles on Oct. 18, with Bella Hadid opening the runway, some viewers called looks “cheap” and wings “extremely tacky,” Fashion Times UK reported, even as others praised Tate McRae’s wings, the gold-wing segment and Elsa Hosk’s look. A conversation that began with a missing Angel ended with a referendum on whether the brand still knows what it is.

Our take: the end of the polite no

Strip away the wings and the diamonds and this is a story about a workplace. Fashion runs on options, holds, “maybes” and silence, and for decades the people at the bottom of that chain absorbed the cost of the ambiguity privately. Models cleared calendars, turned down other jobs, trained for months, and found out from a call sheet or a group chat that they were not in the show.

What Strijd did was not a tantrum. It was documentation. She gave dates. She named the agency. She said she accepted the brand’s right to choose, and she asked for one thing: clarity. And the brand, to its credit, answered with a date of its own. For the first time in a long time, a casting dispute played out in public with both sides on the record.

That is the change. In an age when every model has an audience of her own, the polite no is over. The old silence only worked because nobody outside the room could hear it. Now the room has a comment section.

What Los Angeles can learn from it

We see the other side of this every week. At The Bureau Fashion Week in Los Angeles this month, the models we interviewed described exactly the kind of work that rarely gets credit. Kevin Fernandez told us that “some of us also have full time jobs outside of this.” Sofhia Flores said the job “takes confidence, patience, rejection, and the courage to keep showing up even when things don’t go as planned.” Sophie Rann said it takes “the ability to keep showing up as yourself in an industry that constantly challenges you.” (Their full answers are in our What You Missed chapter.)

None of them said the industry owed them a yes. Neither did Strijd. What they describe, and what she asked for, is a basic professional courtesy: if the answer is no, say no, and say it in time to matter.

Here is a simple standard that every brand, agency and casting director in this city could adopt tomorrow, and that we would happily report on:

• Release in writing. When talent is released from consideration, the talent hears it the same week, not just the agency.
• Date every option. An option without an end date is not an option. It is a waiting room.
• Say “undecided” out loud. If the answer is still uncertain, say so honestly. That is Strijd’s point, and it is a good one.

The verdict

Victoria’s Secret was within its rights. Strijd was within hers. But only one of them understood that the audience is now in the room for the whole process, not just the final walk. The brand gave Vanity Fair a date. The model gave the public a story. In 2026, the story wins.

The next time a casting office goes quiet, someone will post about it. The smart brands will already have answered.

Know something about how casting really works in Los Angeles? We protect our sources. Tips: editor@nightlifereport.app.

Sources

1. Vanity Fair, José Criales-Unzueta, “The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show Casting Drama, Explained,” Fit Check, Oct. 16, 2026: vanityfair.com
2. Vanity Fair, Fit Check follow-up, Oct. 21, 2026: vanityfair.com
3. The Daily Beast, Roosa Rahkonen, “Victoria’s Secret Hit With Wild Nepo-Baby Casting Controversy,” Oct. 13 (updated Oct. 14), 2026: thedailybeast.com
4. Fashion Times UK, Jastine Beatrice Yap, “Victoria’s Secret 2026 Fashion Show Faces Backlash Over ‘Cheap’ Looks and ‘Tacky’ Wings,” Oct. 19, 2026: fashiontimes.co.uk
5. USA Today, Fantasy Bra, Oct. 19, 2026: usatoday.com
6. Interviewee answers: Nightlife Report questionnaire, submitted Oct. 19–21, 2026, under signed release

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