I worked the bra floor at Bloomingdale's 59th Street for thirty-five years, and one of the questions I got the most, usually from a mother shopping with her teenage daughter, was some version of: who decides what a bra is supposed to look like on a woman. Not the engineering of it, the picture of it. The catalog page. The runway. The poster in the mall window. For a long stretch, those pictures came from a very narrow group of women, and the business they built changed the lingerie industry in ways most shoppers never saw.
So this is not a list of who is prettiest. The women below built a category. Some are still working. Some have moved on. The interesting part, to me, is how much the work itself has changed since 2024.
Why the old list needs updating
The original version of this article ran years ago and read like a yearbook of Victoria's Secret Angels from the 2000s. That cast did the work. Gisele Bundchen, Adriana Lima, Heidi Klum, Tyra Banks, Karolina Kurkova, Alessandra Ambrosio, Miranda Kerr, Selita Ebanks, Marisa Miller, Bar Refaeli. Those names sold a lot of bras. But the catwalk those women walked stopped running in 2018, and when it came back in 2024, the cast looked different on purpose.
If you watched the 2024 revival show out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, or the 2025 follow-up, you saw the brand do something it spent twenty years refusing to do: put curve models, trans models, women in their forties and fifties, and an Olympian or two on the same runway as the traditional sample-size girls. Adriana Lima walked her twentieth Victoria's Secret show in 2025. Ashley Graham and Paloma Elsesser made their debuts in 2024 and came back in 2025. That is a shift in what the industry is willing to put on a poster, and a shift in who young women see when they shop for a bra.
The originals who built the catalog page
I will give you my honest read on the women who carried the old business, in no particular ranking. These are working professionals, and I will talk about them as such.
Gisele Bundchen
Brazilian, signed with Victoria's Secret in 2000, walked the show through 2006. Hung up the wings, built a much bigger career outside of intimates, came back in 2023 for the brand's Icon campaign alongside Adriana Lima and Candice Swanepoel. She set the template for how a lingerie model graduates into the rest of fashion.
Adriana Lima
Also Brazilian. Angel from 2000 to 2018, longest-running in the brand's history. Walked the 2025 show, her twentieth, and won Fashion Comeback of the Year at the Daily Front Row awards that spring. She is forty-four now, and the fact that she is still walking the same runway she walked at nineteen tells you something important about what longevity in this business looks like when a brand is willing to keep a woman on the books past thirty.
Tyra Banks
The first Black woman on a Victoria's Secret catalog cover. That is a fact of fashion history, not a footnote. Built a television business after modeling and trained a generation of younger models through her show.
Heidi Klum
German. Walked the Victoria's Secret runway through the early 2000s. Like Tyra, she turned her on-camera presence into a long second career in television. Project Runway is now in its third decade.
Karolina Kurkova, Alessandra Ambrosio, Miranda Kerr, Marisa Miller, Selita Ebanks, Bar Refaeli
The supporting cast of the Angel era. All worked through the 2000s and into the 2010s. Most have moved into beauty brands of their own, motherhood, business ventures, or quieter careers. None of them have to model anymore, and most do not.
The names changing the business right now
If the 2000s belonged to the Brazilians and the tall blondes, the 2024-2026 revival belongs to a wider bench.
Paloma Elsesser
American, size 14, has been on the cover of Vogue. Walked Victoria's Secret in 2024 and 2025. She is the kind of working model who, in the old days, simply was not invited to the show at all.
Ashley Graham
The curve model who broke through with Sports Illustrated in 2016. By her own account, she hesitated on the Victoria's Secret invitation in 2024 because the brand had not historically been for her. She walked anyway. She walked again in 2025.
Valentina Sampaio and Alex Consani
Trans models, both with full-time fashion careers, both on the 2024 runway. Twenty years ago, neither was a category the major lingerie brands acknowledged.
The Savage X Fenty cast
Rihanna's brand, launched in 2018, ran four big Amazon Prime shows through 2022 and changed what a lingerie runway could look like before Victoria's Secret caught up. Savage X carries 30A to 42H in bras and XS to 4X in everything else. The runway shows put pregnant women, athletes, drag performers, and grandmothers in lingerie next to traditional models. That is the precedent the Victoria's Secret revival is responding to, whether the brand says so or not.
What this means for the gal in the dressing room
I will say what I said for thirty-five years on the floor. The picture on the box has very little to do with whether the bra is going to fit you. A 34D on a six-foot model is not a 34D on you, and the band size is doing more work than the cup anyway. The reason the broader runway cast matters is not because you should aspire to look like the model. It is because for the first time in a long time, the woman on the poster might actually share something with the woman in the fitting room: a hip, a tummy, a chest after children, a chest after a mastectomy, a body that did not stop changing in its twenties.
The practical takeaway, for a reader over sixty: when you shop a lingerie brand now, the model gallery is a fair preview of who the brand is actually designing for. If every model on the size-XL page is built like the size-S page, the brand is not really making bras for an XL body. They are putting an XL tag on a small pattern. If the model gallery on the larger sizes is wearing a band that actually grips and a cup that actually holds, you are looking at a brand that has done the engineering work. That gallery is more useful information than it has ever been. Look at it.