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Bella Hadid got surprisingly candid about the way modeling lingerie in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and Savage x Fenty runway made her feel—and she only had glowing things to say about Rihanna’s runway show.
Hadid was speaking at the Vogue Fashion Festival in Paris today when she opened up about her experiences. She never stated Victoria’s Secret explicitly, but said that her experience at Fenty was much more empowering than ones at “other lingerie shows.”
“Rihanna’s amazing,” she told Loïc Prigent and the crowd, via Women’s Wear Daily. “For me, that was the first time on a runway that I felt really sexy. Because when I first did Fenty, I was doing other lingerie shows and I never felt powerful on a runway, like, in my underwear.”
Hadid explained that there wasn’t as much pressure to act a certain way, because Rihanna told her to walk any way she wanted. “I like being another character,” Hadid said. “I think at this point I don’t necessarily love being myself sometimes. Sometimes on the runway you get either nervous or you forget how your legs move.”
Hadid walked the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2016, 2017, and 2018. In July, Shania Shaik revealed in an interview that this year’s VS Fashion Show was canceled.
Victoria’s Secret never explicitly confirmed this, but in May, the New York Times reported that the show would no longer be broadcast on network television due to declining viewership. The chief executive of Victoria’s Secret’s parent company L Brands, Leslie Wexner, said that he and his colleagues “have decided to re-think the traditional Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Going forward we don’t believe network television is the right fit.”