Chinese models making history at Victoria's Secret Fashion Show

The annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show captivates the world like no other fashion event. An estimated 800 million people around the world are set to watch. 

This year, more than 55 models are in Shanghai for the lingerie brand’s first show in Asia taking place on November 20. It will be broadcast around the world the following Monday.

Victoria’s Secret has cast a record eight Chinese models among the most diverse lineup in the show’s history. Some of them are established names and faces like Wen Liu and Ming Xi, but for many, the historical strut down the runway marks their global introduction. CGTN Digital is in Shanghai to take in the fashion phenomenon.

Meet the Chinese models

Estelle Chen

The second time around proved successful for Estelle Chen, who was selected for this year’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. She tried out last year but didn’t make the cut. The 19-year-old has catapulted into high fashion via the Elite Model Look competition. Her credits include the Louis Vuitton cruise shows. 

Her parents both hail from Wenzhou, a city on China’s east coast, south of Shanghai. Chen was born in China but raised in France. She said that even though her dad comes from a fully Chinese background, he taught her more about French culture, while her mom schooled her in Chinese heritage. Chen said she feels like she grew up with both cultures because she returned to China every year for one or two months. 

Most first-timers use the show to boost their global profiles and further their modeling careers, but Chen has different plans. She wants to study economics at the prestigious HEC Paris once she’s walked in Shanghai. Chen has spoken frankly about the inadequate representation of Asian models on the catwalk. In 2016, she took part in Instagram’s #RunwayForAll campaign, which focuses on promoting models from diverse backgrounds.

Sui He

Sui He became the second Chinese model to walk the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in 2011. She has done every show since. Sui He is the first East Asian model to open a Ralph Lauren runway show. She also appeared on the cover of W Magazine as a relative unknown. In 2012, she became the face of Shiseido makeup, making her the first Chinese model to represent the Japanese beauty giant. 

Sui He’s breakthrough season was Fall/Winter 2011. Due to her success, she was named one of New York Magazine's Fall 2011 Top 10 Faces. At the age of 17, while a junior in high school, Sui He entered a Chinese modeling contest and won. Afterwards, she signed with China's Bentley Culture Development Company in Beijing. She was also part of the cast of the 2015 film “You Are My Sunshine”.

Xiao Wen Ju 

Xiao Wen Ju was the first model of Chinese descent to be the face of Marc Jacobs. 

After gaining attention with her appearance on the cover of Harper's Bazaar China in May 2010, she debuted in New York City at the Fall Honor show. Since then, she has graced runways around the world for designers including Shiatzy Chen, Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Prada. 

In addition, Wen Ju was picked for Lane Crawford's F/W 11 campaign, along with other top Chinese models like Ming Xi and Shu Pei. She has also appeared on the cover of Vogue China and Numero China. 

A native from northwest China's Shaanxi Province, Xiao Wen Ju appeared on the cover of Vogue Italia in 2015. In 2016, she became a face of L’Oreal. She walked in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show last year, becoming only the fifth Asian model to do so after Liu Wen, He Sui, Shu Pei and Ming Xi.

Wen Liu

Wen Liu is the first model of East Asian descent to walk the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, the first spokesmodel of East Asian descent for Estée Lauder and the first Asian model to ever make Forbes Magazine's annual highest-paid models list. 

In 2012, The New York Times named Liu "China’s first bona fide supermodel." In 2017, she became the first Chinese model to ever appear on the front cover of American Vogue. In an April 2014 article about social media's rise in the fashion industry, Vogue remarked that she had "by far, the biggest social-media audience of any model." 

Throughout her career, Liu has challenged issues of diversity in the fashion industry. In 2009, she made headlines on her Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show bow. The next year, she became the first Asian model to land an Esteé Lauder cosmetics campaign. An only child, Liu was born into a working-class family in Yongzhou, Hunan.

Shu Pei

Born in Kaifeng, Henan, model and actress Shu Pei signed to Next Management in 2007. Her breakthrough season came in September 2008, when she walked for Christian Dior, Hussein Chalayan, John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood. That September, she appeared in a Vogue China editorial and has since secured three Vogue China covers. 

In 2011, Pei became the face of Vera Wang, and her first Victoria's Secret show was in 2012. She has also embarked on an acting career, and in March 2015 shot her first film, “Oh My God,” directed by Leste Chen and produced by Zhang Ziyi. 

The new mom will make her return to Victoria’s Secret catwalk this year. In January, she and her partner Edison Chen welcomed a baby daughter.

Ming Xi

Ming Xi’s professional modeling career started in 2009 after she attended a TV competition. Her international modeling career took off in 2011 after she walked her first well-known runway show for Givenchy. In the same year, she modeled the Givenchy ready-to-wear collection and appeared as the face of Givenchy’s Fall/Winter publicity advertising campaign. Ming Xi also appeared in Victoria's Secret Fashion Shows in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. 

Now regarded as one of the world’s top supermodels, her services are highly sought-after. Two years after she graduated from college, she participated in the Elite Model Look competition, held by the leading Elite Model Management agency. Xi ranked third. Shortly after the contest, she was offered a contract with Givenchy. 

The 2017 Victoria’s Secret show is a homecoming for Xi, who was raised in Shanghai.

Xin Xie

 Xin Xie is from Guangdong Province and now splits her time between New York, London, and Guangdong. The 22-year-old up-and-comer has already walked the Miu Miu Resort 2016 show and appeared in editorials for Vogue China and Vogue Me. 

As it stands, Xie’s Instagram followers number just over 4,000, a figure that pales in comparison to fellow Victoria’s Secret models like Gigi Hadid (36 million) and Taylor Hill (9 million). 

For Xie, the show might just be the boost she needs to make her a global name. This will be her first time walking in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

Mystery Model

One lucky reality show contestant is getting the ultimate prize. As the soon-to-be-revealed winner of "Road to the Runway China" online reality show, she will be strutting down the runway at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.  

The mystery model will make her professional debut on the runway for fashion's biggest night. Will she be the modeling industry's next rising star? Time will tell.

LONDON (AP) — Sue Tilley was working in an unemployment office when she met the artist Lucian Freud. The paintings he made of her in the 1990s are now among the most famous in modern art — and the most valuable.

“Sleeping by the Lion Carpet,” regarded as one of Freud’s masterpieces, is going up for sale at Sotheby’s on June 24, with a presale estimate of 25 million pounds to 35 million pounds ($33 million to $47 million).

Tilley hasn’t seen any of the millions that the portraits have fetched at auction. But she doesn’t regret a thing.

“It did change my life,” Tilley told The Associated Press as she sat in front of the 7 ½-foot (2.3-meter)-high nude image of herself in the auction house showroom. “Who would have thought I’d be in Sotheby’s?”

“Sleeping by the Lion Carpet,” painted in 1996, is the last of Freud’s four monumental portraits of Tilley reclining, resting or dozing. An earlier painting, “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,” sold at auction in 2008 for $33.6 million, at the time a record for a living artist.

“I was thrilled I was in ‘The Guinness Book of Records,’” said 69-year-old Tilley, who has a rich laugh and an air of delight at the twists her life has taken. “Unfortunately, it didn’t say my name. There was a picture and it said ‘Benefits Supervisor.’ But I was still thrilled that it was there.”

Freud, a grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, is famed for fleshy nudes of friends, family and the artist himself. He slathered oil paint to capture his subjects’ mottled skin tones in portraits that are both unsparing and warm. He even painted Queen Elizabeth II — fully clothed. By the time of his death aged 88 in 2011, he was the most acclaimed British portrait painter of the 20th century.

His reputation has only grown since. Another picture of Tilley, “Benefits Supervisor Resting,” was auctioned in 2015 for $56.2 million. In 2022, his painting “Large Interior, W11” sold for $86 million.

Tilley met Freud through her friend Leigh Bowery, the late Australian performance artist, who also posed for the painter. She recalls “trudging up the stairs” to Freud’s London studio for sittings that involved plentiful tea and chitchat, punctuated by a good lunch. Each portrait was the product of months of work.

“Sleeping by the Lion Carpet,” Tilley says, “was the most comfortable one, because I was sitting up in a chair. Lying down on the sofa looks comfortable, but after a while it got a bit painful.”

Freud painted his friends, lovers, children and colleagues, and the results are bold and exposing. Tilley says that has never bothered her.

“I’m not really vain,” she said. “Sometimes I get out of bed in the morning, and I look at my legs and go, ‘Oh, they look just like that painting.’”

She loved the messy energy of Freud’s studio, where “he used to make you a drink and whisk it up with a dirty old paintbrush, and there was paint absolutely everywhere. I’d go home and there’d be bits of paint all over me.”

Tilley was part of a 1980s and '90s London creative scene, alongside figures like Bowery, who ran the avant-garde Taboo nightclub and died in 1994 aged 33. She says she enjoyed Freud’s tales of an earlier Bohemian era.

“I used to love hearing about when he was roaring around in a Rolls-Royce open top with Cecil Beaton and Marlene Dietrich and goodness knows (who), and when he met Judy Garland,” she said. “I used to love getting the stories of his youth and his misbehavior.”

Tilley is unperturbed that her image is ending up in the hands of the ultra-wealthy. “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” was bought in 2008 by Roman Abramovich, the then-owner of Chelsea Football Club, who was sanctioned by the U.K. after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“Sleeping by the Lion Carpet” is part of a June 24-25 sale from the collection of British billionaire Joe Lewis, the former majority owner of Premier League soccer team Tottenham Hotspur, which is still owned by his family. Also going under the hammer are works by Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and others, collectively valued at more than 150 million pounds ($201 million).

There's a chance “Sleeping by the Lion Carpet” could set a new record. Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, describes it as Freud’s “magnum opus.”

“This is a painting that during his lifetime was very much described by Lucian as being the apogee of everything that he was trying to achieve as a painter,” Barker said. “The market knows, and it’s very savvy, it wants to go for the best of the best — and this is it.”

Tilley, who is retired and lives on England's south coast, says Freud “gave me a couple of etchings, and then I sold them, because I’d rather have the money, and I went on holiday.”

She says she doesn’t regret Freud not leaving her one of the paintings. Her place in art history is secure.

“When I was younger, I used to read art books the whole time and read all about the Pre-Raphaelites and the Impressionists, all the goings on, how they’re all friends and interconnected and all the models knew each other," she said.

“And now, I’ve only just realized, I’m part of that. And that’s thrilling for me that I’ve achieved my ambition without really knowing it.”

Sue Tilley, a model for British painter Lucian Freud, speaks in front of Freud's painting of her, titled "Sleeping by the Lion Carpet" during an interview in Sotheby's auction house in London, Thursday, May 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Sue Tilley, a model for British painter Lucian Freud, poses in front of Freud's painting of her, titled "Sleeping by the Lion Carpet" during an interview in Sotheby's auction house in London, Thursday, May 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Sue Tilley, a model for British painter Lucian Freud, poses in front of Freud's painting of her, titled "Sleeping by the Lion Carpet" during an interview in Sotheby's auction house in London, Thursday, May 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Sue Tilley, a model for British painter Lucian Freud, poses in front of Freud's painting of her, titled "Sleeping by the Lion Carpet" during an interview in Sotheby's auction house in London, Thursday, May 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Sue Tilley, a model for British painter Lucian Freud, poses in front of Freud's painting of her, titled "Sleeping by the Lion Carpet" during an interview in Sotheby's auction house in London, Thursday, May 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)