Why Adriana Lima and Bella Hadid Keep Sharing the Same Runway

Adriana Lima and Bella Hadid keep turning up in the same photos. They walked the revived Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show together in 2024 and again in 2025, and this past May they stood feet apart on the same Cannes red carpet. Two of the most recognized faces in modeling, a generation apart, booked for the same rooms again and again.

Most of the coverage stops at the picture. The fuller story is in how differently each woman arrived there, and what their return says about the brand that brought them back.

When the two models have appeared together

If their names keep landing side by side, here is why. They have shared three major moments in roughly a year and a half.

• October 2024: Both walked the first Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in six years, held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
• October 2025: Both returned for the show at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, the year Lima reached her 20th career walk.
• May 2026: Both attended the Garance premiere at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, each in Chopard.

The repeat pairing is a casting decision. One is the brand’s longest-serving veteran. The other is the biggest fashion name of her generation. Put together, they sell the idea that the show is back and that its history is intact.

Two careers that barely overlap

People group Lima and Hadid as “Victoria’s Secret models,” but their time with the label looks almost nothing alike.

Lima is the institution. She walked her first show in 1999 at seventeen, became an Angel in 2000, opened the show five times, and stayed eighteen years. Across her career she has worn 26 sets of wings, more than any model the show has cast. She missed only two editions in her Angel run, one in 2004 when no show was held and one in 2009 when she was pregnant.

Hadid is the bigger name outside the lingerie world. In 2017 she broke Doutzen Kroes’s record for the most Vogue September covers in a single year, landing five international editions at once. By 2023 she was among the highest-paid models in the business, reporting close to 19 million dollars in earnings, before she stepped away from the runway.

Bella Hadid’s 2025 return, and the year behind it

Hadid’s 2025 walk reads very differently once you line up the months that led to it.

In June 2025, she covered British Vogue. In the interview she said working for Victoria’s Secret while managing endometriosis was something she felt should be illegal, and not only during her period but the week before it. The cover reached newsstands in late spring.

A few months later the year turned. In September 2025, Hadid spent about a month in hospital with symptoms tied to the chronic Lyme disease she was diagnosed with in 2012. Her mother, Yolanda Hadid, shared photographs from the ward and wrote that watching her daughter struggle in silence had cut the deepest core of hopelessness inside her.

Four weeks after that, Hadid was on the Brooklyn runway. She walked a red bra and matching garter with red tights, then a silver look with white wings, debuting bright platinum blonde hair. The brand’s own recap called it one of her most memorable appearances.

Plenty of outlets framed it as a triumph. It was also a return, weeks out of a hospital bed, to the same job she had described months earlier as something that should be against the law.

Adriana Lima never really left

When the Daily Front Row handed Lima its Fashion Comeback of the Year award in April 2025, the word “comeback” did not quite fit.

She had kept working the whole time. After her 2018 retirement from Victoria’s Secret she fronted campaigns, signed brand deals, and in 2023 became FIFA’s first global fan ambassador. What shifted was not her schedule. It was that Victoria’s Secret wanted her on its runway again, which let a steady career get retold as a return.

Her history with the show carries some heavy chapters. In 2011, Lima told The Daily Telegraph that her preparation before a Victoria’s Secret show included nine days on only protein shakes, then no liquids at all for the final three days, losing as much as eight pounds in that last stretch. CNN’s Anderson Cooper put the regimen on his “Ridiculist.” Lima pushed back, saying she had an athlete’s mind and trained the way athletes do. Some version of that preparation ran through her Angel years, the same years that built the legacy the brand now markets.

There was a softer moment in 2025 worth sitting with. Before the show, a Victoria’s Secret staff writer asked Lima who she would most want to walk alongside. She named her daughters. Her older daughter, Valentina, was fifteen at the time, close to the age Lima was when a school friend talked her into entering her first modeling contest. The woman who gave the runway eighteen years now measures it against the people she would least want shaped by it.

What the relaunched show quietly dropped

Look at what Victoria’s Secret brought back and what it left behind, and the shift comes into focus.

Back on the runway: the wings, the lingerie, veteran Angels including Lima, Candice Swanepoel, and Alessandra Ambrosio, the celebrity performers, and the Brooklyn staging. Gone: the Fantasy Bra, the jeweled centerpiece worth millions that anchored the show for two decades, absent in both 2024 and 2025. The Swarovski wings disappeared with it.

The casting widened. WNBA star Angel Reese and Olympic gymnast Suni Lee became the first professional athletes to walk the show in 2025, and the wings took on a more sculptural shape. Those are real changes. Underneath them, the format holds: famous bodies as spectacle, personal health left to the model to manage, the return itself staged as a marketing event.

The show went dark in 2018 after viewership fell, after a senior executive said he would not cast transgender or plus-size models, and after the brand’s link to Jeffrey Epstein drew scrutiny. The relaunch addressed the optics. The pressures that shaped Lima’s eighteen years and Hadid’s health story were never really part of the conversation.

The Cannes red carpet that framed it

On May 17, 2026, both women walked the Garance premiere at Cannes. Hadid wore custom Prada with Chopard diamonds, marking her tenth straight year at the festival. Lima wore Nicholas Oakwell Couture with an emerald and diamond Chopard necklace.

A generation separates them, yet there they were in the same jeweler on the same staircase at the Palais des Festivals. The photo was clean and the symbolism was hard to miss. The industry that shaped both of them keeps putting them in front of the cameras, and keeps being praised for how well they have endured it.

What their pairing actually shows

The respect between Adriana Lima and Bella Hadid is real, and neither needs anyone to speak for her. They are two women who gave a punishing business their best years and chose, in full view, to step back into it.

What the coverage keeps leaving out is the cost on either side of that choice. A return can feel like reclaiming something. It can also mean walking back into the same room that once took something from you, repainted and waiting, because the room still wants you in it. Both said yes. The brand got its headline. Who that return really belonged to is the part still worth asking about.

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