In other words, what brands lose when they cast audiences instead of achievement.
A model's job is to disappear.
That's the bit people forget. A good runway model makes you look at the coat, not at her. She is a beautifully trained, very well-lit coat hanger, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
An influencer's job is the opposite. She is there to be seen. The coat is her supporting act.
So when brands swap one for the other, they aren't just changing the cast. They're changing what the show is for.
This isn't a trend anymore. It's the default.
This season it went fully mainstream. W Magazine is tracking famous faces on the Spring/Summer 2027 runways and notes that celebrities now appear there almost as often as models do. In Paris, Clavicular, a streamer the press has described as an internet provocateur, opened 424's SS27 show.
The numbers explain why. At NYFW Spring/Summer 2025, Launchmetrics found influencers drove roughly 23% of total media impact, close to half of what traditional media delivered. NYFW's owner now has an exclusive social partner whose roster of 900 creators captures and amplifies the shows in real time.
The show isn't the event anymore. The content about the show is the event.
Beauty got there first
Beauty has always sold a face, so it's been running this experiment for years. Space NK once dropped models from a spring campaign and worked with six influencers instead, including beauty editors, bloggers and make-up artists.
Today it goes much further than a campaign. Creators aren't just fronting products, they're co-creating them. The industry conversation has moved from one-off sponsored posts to deeper collaborations where brands hand creators more creative freedom and build campaigns together.
Done well, that's brilliant.
Done lazily, it's a brand outsourcing its point of view to whoever trended last quarter.
An audience is not the sole achievement brands should consider
Here's the part that bothers me most.
A follower count tells you how many people are watching. It doesn't tell you what someone has done.
Think about who used to get the audition or brand call. The athlete who trained for a decade. The make-up artist who built a career backstage. The model who spent years learning to walk. The founder who built something from nothing.
Those people still exist. They're just being considered less, because achievement doesn't always come with a big enough audience attached.
Victoria's Secret actually shows how it can be done. At last year's show it put basketball player Angel Reese and Olympic gymnast Sunisa Lee on the runway, alongside creators Quenlin Blackwell and Gabriela Moura. An Olympian earned her walk long before she earned her followers. That sends a very different signal about what a brand values.
And for women in particular, that signal matters.
Women in sport have spent decades fighting for the sponsorship and visibility their male peers got by default.
Every time a brand picks reach over accomplishment, it tells young women which of those two things is worth more.
To be clear: I'm not anti-influencer
Plenty of creators have built genuine expertise, real businesses and communities that trust them more than they'll ever trust a brand. Many of them deserve the work.
The point is to know why you're choosing someone.
Are they bringing craft? Credibility? A story that fits yours? Or are you just renting their audience for a weekend?
Those are different decisions with different consequences. Most brands treat them as the same one.
Victoria's Secret plays a different game
At VS, the models aren't the coat hanger. They are the show.
Nobody tuned in for the bras. They tuned in for the Angels. I remember growing up watching them on TV and thinking wow.
So it's worth paying attention to what happened this week.
Romee Strijd, an Angel for years, posted on TikTok that she'd been turned down for this year's show. She's 31, a mum of two, and spent the summer training to come back. After weeks of silence, her agent passed on the verdict: she was great, but "they thought you wouldn't fit in the show this year." Frida Aasen, who walked VS twice, said she got a no too.
VS hasn't said why. Maybe it's a creative call. Who knows.
At the same time, VS is running Angels Among Us, a YouTube competition where more than 100,000 hopefuls entered for a shot at the runway and a modelling contract.
Read that back. The brand is asking 100,000 women to audition on camera for a job, while a woman who already did that job, brilliantly, for years, gets a no via her agent.
VS can cast more bodies and ages than ever and still treat a model who helped build the face of the brand like a contestant who didn't make the cut. Both things are true.
The risk nobody puts in the brief
Every casting decision is also a message to the people who already love you.
The VS fans noticed. They went straight to the comparison: veterans rejected, while influencers got a slot last year. Some are now even talking about a boycott. That is maybe a bit dramatic considering what else is going on in the world, but brand loyalists clearly care.
One fan summed up the frustration: the brand runs an entire YouTube show demanding endless requirements from aspiring Angels, then lets influencers walk simply for being famous.
That's the trade-off brands keep missing.
You tap into a creator's audience, and you might gain thousands of new eyes. But you can also alienate the customers who were there first. The ones who bought in because of what you stood for, and who now feel like you've swapped them for someone else's followers.
New attention is easy to measure. Lost loyalty isn't.
It just shows up later, in the sales figures, when nobody remembers why anymore.
High end and high street want different things from a face
This is an important distinction, in my opinion.
High-end fashion sells a designer's vision. The model exists to serve it. Put a personality in front of the clothes and you may dilute the one thing you're charging €3,000 for.
High street and mass brands sell identity. "People like me wear this." There, the person is the product, and a creator with a loyal audience can make perfect sense.
Victoria's Secret sits in the second camp. It's a mass-market brand that dresses itself up as spectacle.
The trouble starts when luxury houses borrow the high street playbook. They get a spike in views and a gradual leak in mystery.
And mystery, unlike followers, takes decades to build and one bad season to lose.
Who pays for it
Modelling is overwhelmingly a young, female, precarious workforce. Fashion week is where careers get made. Every slot handed out for a follower count is a job, a fee and a portfolio moment taken from someone who trained for it.
Models have said this out loud. It's easy to dismiss as not a big deal. It's harder to dismiss when you notice which group of mostly young women is losing income so a brand can chase a metric.
Short-term views, long-term brand
Most of these decisions are made for the moment. One show. One drop. One campaign.
But every collaboration is also a long-term statement about who you are. Who you put on your runway or your packaging becomes part of your brand's memory. Do it often enough and it stops being a campaign and starts being your identity.
There's also a simple maths problem.
A creator's audience belongs to the creator. Even Launchmetrics has warned that designers should put more into their own social channels instead of leaning too hard on influencers.
When the contract ends, the audience goes home with its owner.
What's left is whatever you built yourself.
So what should brands actually do?
Not pick a side. Find a balance, on purpose.
Before casting anyone, ask a few unglamorous questions:
Why this person, beyond their numbers?
What have they actually done?
Who might we lose by choosing them?
What will this say about us in three years, not three days?
Cast creators where they add story, craft or credibility. Cast athletes, artists and experts for what they've achieved, not just for who's watching. Pay models properly and treat the ones who built your brand like they matter, because they do.
And measure something more useful than views. Like whether anyone remembers what they were wearing.
Because a show everyone watched and nobody remembers the clothes from isn't a fashion show.
It's a very expensive TikTok.
