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10 Secrets Behind The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show

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Backstage at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the glamour is built on a schedule as strict as any locker room.

Millions of viewers tune in every year to watch the Angels strut down a runway dripping in rhinestones, sequins, and 20-pound wings, but the broadcast hides months of grinding preparation and a production operation run with military precision. Founded in 1995 under L Brands chief Les Wexner and longtime Victoria’s Secret marketing executive Ed Razek, the show grew from a single runway event into an estimated $20 million-plus global television spectacle built around the brand’s contract “Angels” and A-list musical headliners. What actually happens behind the curtain — the diets, the wing rigs, the armed guards — is a lot less glamorous than what airs in prime time.

• Models follow months-long fitness regimens and strict liquid-only, dehydration-heavy diets in the days before filming to hit exact runway measurements.
• The signature wings can weigh 20 to 30 pounds, forcing models into specialized core training just to walk the runway without stumbling.
• The multi-million-dollar Fantasy Bra is guarded around the clock by armed security, with the wearer chosen in secret as the pinnacle honor for an Angel.

The Diet and Training Regimen

Getting cast is only the beginning. Angels spend months working toward the show under punishing conditioning schedules, and in the final stretch before taping, many switch to liquid-only diets and deliberate dehydration protocols to look their leanest under the lighting rigs. It’s a regimen built for one night of television rather than everyday health, and it’s treated as a normal cost of doing business on this particular runway.

Engineering the Wings

Nothing on the runway carries more prestige than the wings, and nothing is harder to walk in. Custom sets built for the show’s biggest segments can weigh 20 to 30 pounds once the framework, feathers, and embellishments are assembled, which means models have to train their core strength specifically to keep their balance and posture while modeling them under hot studio lights. Getting handed the wings for a marquee segment is treated backstage as a signal of where a model ranks in the show’s pecking order.

The Fantasy Bra’s Secret Selection

Since its debut in 1996, the Fantasy Bra has functioned as the show’s true centerpiece — a single, seven-figure piece that requires round-the-clock armed security and painstaking fittings in the lead-up to filming. The Angel chosen to wear it is selected privately, and the reveal is treated internally as the highest individual honor a model can receive in the brand’s runway history.

Wearing the Fantasy Bra is considered the pinnacle of an Angel’s career — and the identity of who’s wearing it stays locked down until showtime.

Backstage Chaos and Competitive Edge

With 40 to 50 models cycling through hair, makeup, and spray tans simultaneously, the backstage area runs on dozens of stylists working in overlapping shifts against the clock. That kind of density breeds real tension — models and their teams compete over segment assignments, costume details, and wing sizes, since each choice signals standing within the show’s hierarchy. It’s less a dressing room than a coordinated sprint against a hard broadcast deadline.

Two Tapings, One Seamless Broadcast

What airs as one clean prime-time hour is actually filmed twice in front of separate live audiences, giving editors two full takes to cut between. That’s how wardrobe malfunctions, runway stumbles, and production glitches from one taping get quietly patched over with footage from the other — the polished final cut viewers see at home is a composite, not a single unbroken performance.

For anyone wondering how a live-feeling broadcast never seems to show a slip or a snag, that’s the answer — two full runs of the same show, stitched together in the edit bay. The same instinct for image control that keeps the Fantasy Bra under armed guard is what keeps the cameras rolling twice before anything ever reaches a television screen, the same instinct that’s driven scrutiny of the modeling world’s standards elsewhere, from America’s Next Top Model’s past winners to newer names weighing whether to step into the modeling industry at all.