Two LED screens, each eleven metres wide and nine high, rode a 33-metre track behind the Victoria’s Secret runway last October, parting and closing on cue. A ten-metre circular lighting truss came down on six hoists over a 3,500-kilo video platform, rigged by the automation firm WICreations. That is a broadcast set with a catwalk running through it, and the audience is now part of the rig: membership in the brand’s 16,000-strong creator community is a route to a seat. The show moves to Los Angeles in October, and the room will be lit for the phones in it.

The seat is not a favour. Victoria’s Secret has run its creator program since October 2023 on Duel, a brand-advocacy platform, in tiers paying higher affiliate commissions, gift cards and features on the brand’s channels. Invitations sit at the top of that ladder, and its most active advocates were seated at the 2025 show. Duel’s chief executive, Paul Archer, told Glossy: “We’ve got some people with a few thousand followers that are the biggest drivers of income for these massive, massive brands. And they’re never the ones that the brands pick.” Selecting on output instead of follower count is a casting brief, and it fills the seats with operators rather than names.

The front row has been reclassified from audience to equipment.

The viewing figures explain why. The 2025 show peaked above 2.5 million concurrent viewers on the brand’s YouTube channel and held close to two million across 105 minutes, the seventh-largest single-channel livestream of the year. Streaming views reached roughly 61 million in the four weeks that followed, up more than 60 percent on the previous year, chief executive Hillary Super told analysts on the third-quarter call. Most of the show is watched after it ends, in fragments, at whatever length a feed allows.

Build for that and the lighting goes first. A phone sensor is small and its auto-exposure is decisive: a hard spot on a dark runway blows a white satin cup to paper and drops a wing into black. So ambient fill rises, contrast falls, and the drama migrates out of the light and into objects big enough to survive a bad exposure — screens that part, a truss that descends, a platform that lifts. The wider industry says this out loud now, and iDEKO, a New York production agency, describes 2026 fashion-week sets as “engineered for vertical video” with “dedicated shooting areas with perfect lighting”. Chiaroscuro is the casualty, because it does not survive being re-encoded by a stranger’s handset.

The frame changes next. The 2025 show drew viewers across both broadcast platforms and social apps, and every phone in the seats shot 9:16 by default. Portrait crops a runway’s length and pays for height, which rewards wings, headpieces, platform boots and volume in the hair, and wastes the horizontal effect of models walking abreast. Pacing follows the cameras: one lens at the end of the runway needs a single mark, and lenses down both sides need marks the whole way along.

Massed cameras used to mean one position, the pit at the end of the runway, which is why models still walk to a mark and hold it. Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis, shown in Paris on 6 October 2009, broke that arrangement. Motion-controlled cameras ran on tracks beside the catwalk, following the models, in Dazed’s account, “looking at them as if they were prey,” then swivelling to scan the front row. Nick Knight streamed it, Lady Gaga tweeted the link to six million followers, and the bandwidth gave out; Knight later called it “like having a party for ten thousand people and six million turn up.” The camera became scenery that night, and it was one machine on rails with its moves programmed in advance.

The 2026 camera is hand-held, seated and unprogrammed, which the trade is reading as an access story: gatekeepers gone, the front row open to anyone with reach. The exchange runs the other way. Victoria’s Secret is contracting for coverage and paying in proximity, and Super calls the result an “ongoing franchise”, a scheduling word rather than a fashion one. A production that has to read from every seat, on every sensor, in two aspect ratios will keep choosing large legible movement over anything that needs a good camera to notice.

Wings read well on a phone. That was always true, and it is now a constraint on everything standing next to them. The set can be scaled up until it survives every lens in the room; the clothes cannot.