Valentina Sampaio

In August 2019 Victoria's Secret cast Valentina Sampaio, a Brazilian model from the coastal town of Aquiraz, in a campaign for its PINK line, making her the first openly transgender model the brand had hired. Five years later she walked the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, and in between she became the first openly transgender model in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

Aquiraz, Fortaleza and a makeup artist

Sampaio was born on December 10, 1996, in Aquiraz, a fishing village in the state of Ceara in northeastern Brazil. She left architecture school and was studying fashion in Fortaleza, the state capital, when a makeup artist spotted her and steered her toward modeling.

Vogue Paris, February 2017

Her international break came with the cover of Vogue Paris in February 2017, the first time the magazine had put a transgender model on its cover. L'Oreal followed with a short film about her for International Women's Day and made her a brand ambassador. The same year she acted in the Brazilian film Berenice Procura and appeared in the television series A Forca do Querer.

Valentina Sampaio and Victoria's Secret

PINK, 2019

The Victoria's Secret booking came at a sensitive moment for the brand. In November 2018 its marketing chief had told Vogue that the runway show should not include transgender models, and the backlash was still running when Sampaio's PINK shoot was announced on August 2, 2019. The timing made the casting news in its own right.

The VS Collective and the 2024 runway

In 2021 the company retired its Angels and replaced them with the VS Collective, a group of ambassadors that included Sampaio. When the runway show returned on October 15, 2024, in New York, she and Alex Consani became the first two transgender models to walk it. Anok Yai was in the same cast.

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, 2020

In 2020 Sampaio appeared in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, the first openly transgender model in its pages. A year later Leyna Bloom became the magazine's first openly transgender cover model, which places Sampaio's issue at the start of a short sequence of firsts in the swimsuit trade.

Her later contracts have been in beauty: she became an Armani Beauty ambassador in late 2021. Her lingerie record is short but specific, a 2019 campaign, a place in the 2021 ambassador group and a 2024 runway, and each of those bookings came at a point when Victoria's Secret was trying to change how the public saw it.

Last updated October 7, 2026