Romee Strijd Says She Was Left Hanging for Five Weeks Before Victoria’s Secret Said No

Romee Strijd did everything she was supposed to do. She trained all summer. She flew to New York for a casting. She waited. And waited. And then, five weeks later, with the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show less than a week away, she finally got an answer she had already started to dread.

It was a no.

The former Victoria’s Secret Angel shared the whole messy story herself on TikTok on Monday, October 12, in two videos that have since struck a nerve far beyond the fashion world. Because this wasn’t really a story about a runway. It was a story about being left hanging, about doing the work and getting silence in return, and about what happens when the people who are supposed to be in your corner don’t quite show up.

Strijd, 31, hadn’t walked the Victoria’s Secret runway since 2018. A lot has changed since then. She got married. She became a mom twice over. She built a whole life in the Netherlands with her husband, Laurens van Leeuwen, and their two young daughters. And somewhere in there, she started thinking about the show again. Not with desperation, exactly. More like a quiet what-if. What if she went back? What if this was the right moment?

This summer, it started to feel like the right moment. So she trained. She carved time out of a schedule that already had very little slack in it. She got herself ready, physically and mentally, for a casting. Then in September, she flew to New York and walked into the room.

Here’s the part that stings. She didn’t walk in as a stranger. She knew the casting director. She knew people from a shoot she had done with the brand. She had history with Victoria’s Secret, real history, the kind you can measure in wings and Swarovski crystals. And still, she had to go through the same process as everyone else. No shortcuts. No promises. Just a casting, like any other model hoping for a spot.

She left New York expecting to hear back soon. That’s how these things usually go. A casting happens, decisions get made, phones ring. Instead, nothing happened. Days passed. Then a week. Then more weeks. The show kept getting closer, and her phone stayed quiet.

Meanwhile, she kept training. That’s the part people forget when they talk about modeling like it’s just standing around looking pretty. Training for a runway show is work. It’s early mornings and careful eating and workouts fitted around nap schedules and school runs and everything else that comes with running a household with two small kids. Strijd kept doing it because she thought she might still get the call. Because nobody told her otherwise.

Five weeks. That’s how long she was left in limbo, checking in with her agency, asking for updates, getting told she was still on some kind of maybe list. By the time she posted her first TikTok on Monday, the show was six days away. She still hadn’t heard a yes or a no.

So she said it out loud herself. It was probably a no. She was still training, just in case, because fashion is famously last-minute and stranger things have happened. But she could read the room. Or, more accurately, she could read the silence.

The Phone Call That Changed the Story

A couple of hours after that first video went up, Strijd posted a second one. This time, she had an answer. She had talked to her agency. And the answer was definitive.

No. She wasn’t walking the show.

Her reaction to the rejection itself was remarkably grounded. Rejection, she said, is part of modeling. That’s the job. You hear no far more often than you hear yes, and if you can’t handle that, you don’t last long in this business. She has been doing this since she was a teenager. She knows the drill.

What she couldn’t let go of was everything around the no. The weeks of silence. The mixed messages. The feeling that she had been kept in the dark while her life carried on around her.

When she asked her agency why she hadn’t booked the show, the answer she got was vague: she just wouldn’t fit in the show this year. She pushed for more. She wanted something concrete, something she could actually understand and move on from. Instead, she got a different story entirely. Someone told her she had already been released, which didn’t match what she had been told for weeks.

Think about that for a second. For weeks, she had been asking for updates and hearing that a decision was still pending. Then, suddenly, the story was that the decision had already been made. Those two things can’t both be true. And that contradiction, more than the rejection itself, is what got under her skin.

She also learned that the casting director had told her agency late the previous week that things weren’t there yet with her, and that they would have an answer before the weekend. The weekend came and went. No answer. Just more waiting, more training, more mental energy spent on a question nobody would answer straight.

Strijd didn’t mince words about how that felt. She said she doesn’t feel supported by her agency. She said she doesn’t feel like she got the straight story. And honestly, it’s hard to watch her videos and disagree. All she wanted was a clear answer, early enough to actually plan her life around it. Instead, she got five weeks of maybe.

“I don’t feel supported by my agency,” she said in the second video, and you could hear the frustration in it. Not anger, exactly. More like exhaustion. The exhaustion of someone who kept asking a simple question and kept getting fog in return.

Her ask was so small it almost hurts to hear it. Just be honest, she said. Just tell me. If it’s a closed chapter, tell me it’s a closed chapter, and I’ll close it and move on. She could live with the no. What she couldn’t live with was not knowing.

Why This Comeback Mattered to Her

To understand why this one hit so hard, you have to understand what Victoria’s Secret meant to Strijd’s career, and what a return would have meant now.

Strijd was discovered as a teenager in the Netherlands and moved to New York to model full-time. She walked her first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2014, when she was still in her late teens. A year later, in 2015, she was named a Victoria’s Secret Angel, joining one of the most famous lineups in fashion. She held that title through 2018, walking the show every year along the way.

The 2018 show was a big one for her. She was chosen to wear the Shooting Star Swarovski look in the finale section, one of those moments that models remember forever. Swarovski and Victoria’s Secret went together like champagne and New Year’s Eve. Getting picked to close a section in a look covered in crystals was a stamp of approval from the brand. It said: we see you, we trust you, you’re one of ours.

Then the show went away. Victoria’s Secret cancelled its annual fashion show after 2018 amid falling ratings and a growing cultural conversation about whether the whole Angels concept still fit the moment. The brand spent years rethinking itself. The show eventually came back, in a new form, in 2024. But by then, Strijd’s life looked completely different.

She had married van Leeuwen. She had welcomed her first daughter, Mint, in 2020, and her second daughter, June, in 2022. She had built a massive following on social media and YouTube, where fans follow her workouts, her family life, her travels, and her famously disciplined routines. She had become something a lot of models never quite manage: a person with a life beyond the runway, and an audience that cares about that life.

So a comeback in 2026 wouldn’t have been just another booking. It would have been a full-circle moment. A mom of two, back on the runway where she made her name, in a show that had itself been through a reinvention. That’s a story people would have loved. That’s the kind of moment the new Victoria’s Secret, with all its talk about evolution and inclusion, is supposed to be built for.

And she wanted it. She said so plainly. She trained for it. She flew across an ocean for it. She did everything that was in her power to do, and then she waited for someone else to decide.

That’s what makes the five weeks of silence so rough. It wasn’t just a scheduling annoyance. It was five weeks of a working mom rearranging her life around a maybe, while the people with the actual answer couldn’t seem to give her one.

The Bigger Conversation Her Videos Started

Strijd’s videos landed the way they did because they tapped into something a lot of people recognize, even if they’ve never set foot on a runway. Almost everyone has been left hanging by someone with power over their schedule. A job interview that goes quiet. A client who says “we’ll circle back” and never does. A landlord, a contractor, a boss, a friend. The specifics change. The feeling doesn’t. You’re stuck. You can’t make other plans, because what if this comes through? And you can’t move on, because nobody will just say the thing.

In modeling, that dynamic is even sharper. Models are freelancers. Their agencies are supposed to be their advocates, the people who chase down answers, negotiate, protect their time. When that relationship works, it’s a partnership. When it doesn’t, a model can end up doing all the emotional labor herself: chasing, asking, waiting, wondering whether she’s being annoying for asking the same question for the fifth time.

Strijd’s complaint wasn’t really about Victoria’s Secret. She didn’t trash the brand. She didn’t say the show would be bad without her. In fact, she said the opposite. She said she thinks it’ll be a good show. She just didn’t like how the process went, or how she was treated along the way. That’s a pretty measured take from someone who just spent five weeks in limbo.

It also raises a question the fashion industry has been dodging for years: how do you treat the women who built your brand when they come back as mothers? The industry loves a comeback story in theory. In practice, moms in modeling still talk about being quietly written off, or held to standards that don’t account for the fact that their bodies and lives have changed. Strijd didn’t accuse anyone of that here. She didn’t claim she was rejected because she has kids. The reason she was given was simply that she wouldn’t fit this year’s show. But the way the whole thing dragged on, with no clarity, is exactly the kind of experience that makes working moms in fashion feel like an afterthought.

There’s another layer to this too. The new Victoria’s Secret has worked hard to reposition itself as a more inclusive, more modern brand. The 2026 show’s lineup, at least the names announced so far, reflects that. It includes longtime Angels and newer faces, plus-size models and trailblazers. It’s a broader stage than the old show ever was. Strijd, a former Angel with a huge following and a real-life story that fits the brand’s new message, would seem like a natural fit for that stage. That she wasn’t even given a straight answer makes the gap between the brand’s message and its process look pretty wide.

None of this means the casting directors made the wrong call on the lineup. Casting a fashion show is a puzzle. There are only so many spots. Looks have to balance. Themes have to cohere. Someone always gets left out, and sometimes the reasons are as boring as “we already had three blondes in that section.” That’s fine. That’s the job. The problem here was never the decision. It was the five weeks of silence that came before it.

Who Is Walking the 2026 Show?

So who did make the cut? So far, ten models have been revealed for this year’s show: Adriana Lima, Gigi Hadid, Paloma Elsesser, Imaan Hammam, Anok Yai, Candice Swanepoel, Ashley Graham, Abby Champion, Alex Consani, and Devyn Garcia.

That’s a lineup with some real range. Lima and Swanepoel are Angels royalty, back on the runway where they made their names. Hadid is one of the biggest models on the planet. Elsesser and Graham represent the fuller-figured side of the new Victoria’s Secret. Hammam and Yai are high-fashion stars with serious runway credentials. Consani and Garcia bring the new generation. Champion rounds out the group.

It’s a strong cast, and it tells you something about where the show is headed. This isn’t the old Victoria’s Secret show, with its narrow definition of sexy and its rows of nearly identical Angels. It’s a bigger, messier, more interesting tent. Which is exactly why Strijd’s absence feels like a missed opportunity to some fans, and why her videos hit the way they did.

The 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show takes place on Sunday, October 18. Expect more names to drop in the coming days, along with the usual flood of behind-the-scenes content, fittings, rehearsals, and last-minute chaos that comes with putting on a show of this size.

A Closed Chapter, On Her Terms

At the end of her second video, Strijd did something that took more grace than most people would have managed. She closed the chapter herself.

She said she doesn’t think she’s going to go through casting again. Not because she’s bitter, exactly, but because she didn’t like how this one went. She didn’t like the process. She didn’t like the way she was treated. And she’d rather keep the good memories intact than risk another round of the same.

That’s a boundary, not a tantrum. It’s a woman who has spent more than a decade in an industry that runs on other people’s opinions, deciding that her time and her peace of mind are worth more than another shot at a runway. It’s also a pretty powerful note to end on. She didn’t beg for a spot. She didn’t ask fans to pressure the brand. She just said: this chapter is closed, and I closed it.

And here’s the thing. She gets to do that. She has a career that doesn’t depend on one show. She has a family, a following, a business, a life. The runway was a chapter, a big one, a glittering one. But it was never the whole book.

Still, it’s hard not to feel a pang for the version of this story where she got a quick, kind, honest no in week one, thanked everyone, stopped training, and spent those five weeks doing something else with her time. Or the version where she got a yes, and walked out in October as a mom of two, closing a circle that started when she was a teenager. Either version would have been cleaner than the one she got.

Instead, she got five weeks of maybe. And then she got to tell the world about it, in her own words, on her own terms. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that. She didn’t wait for someone else to tell her story. She told it herself, calmly and clearly, and she walked away with her dignity and her good memories intact.

The show will go on without her on Sunday. It’ll probably be a good show, just like she said. But her videos will linger a lot longer than any single runway walk. Because they weren’t really about a fashion show at all. They were about what it feels like to be left waiting by people who owe you an answer, and about the quiet power of finally saying: enough. I’m closing this chapter myself.

Source: Just Jared