Adriana Lima keeps telling the same story about Tyra Banks, and it is not much of a story.
She was 18, just starting out with Victoria’s Secret, and by her own account nervous on the set of her first commercial for the brand. Banks was already one of the most recognized models in America, the first Black woman to appear on the covers of GQ and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She came over and said hello. “She asked me where I was from,” Lima told Hello! in 2016, recalling that Banks was shooting a movie around that time. Banks told her to relax and be confident. Then they both went back to work.
British Vogue ran a version of that account in 2013 under a headline calling Banks her mentor. Lima was still repeating it to Hello! three years later, and it has surfaced in her interviews on and off since, long after there was anything left to gain from saying it.
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What Banks and Lima actually shared
Less than the reunion coverage suggests. Photo agency archives from the period place the two of them together at least five times, and every one of those occasions falls between 2000 and 2005.
| When | Where |
|---|---|
| May 19, 2000 | Victoria’s Secret show in Cannes, France |
| November 19, 2002 | Ribbon cutting at the new Herald Square store in New York, with Heidi Klum |
| 2003 | The ninth annual show at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York |
| 2004 | Angels Across America tour, alongside Klum, Gisele Bรผndchen and Alessandra Ambrosio |
| 2005 | The tenth annual show, Banks’ last |
The 2004 tour happened because there was no show that year. Victoria’s Secret canceled it and sent five of its Angels to New York, Miami, Las Vegas and Los Angeles instead, which is how the two of them ended up doing store appearances together rather than a runway.
After 2005 there is no record of them appearing together again for nearly 20 years.
Worth saying plainly, since it comes up: what Lima describes is a mentor, not a friend. Nothing in the public record suggests the two were close outside work, and Lima has never claimed otherwise.
So the woman she keeps mentioning is someone she worked alongside for five years while she was very young, and has barely crossed paths with since. The account has held up for a quarter of a century. It also covers a narrow slice of time.
The split came in 2005
Banks walked the tenth Victoria’s Secret show and left modeling that year, though she had started building the next thing well before that. America’s Next Top Model launched in 2003, while she was still walking runways. She hosted 22 cycles on UPN and The CW, stepped back for one cycle in 2016 when Rita Ora took over and Banks stayed on as executive producer, then returned to host the 24th and final cycle, which ended in April 2018.
Lima went the other way. She stayed on the runway another 13 years, wore the Fantasy Bra three times, and retired from Victoria’s Secret in November 2018, a few months before the brand shut the show down.
Their long runs finished within seven months of each other, which is roughly where the similarity stops. For 15 years Banks decided, on camera, which young women advanced and which went home. Lima was never handed that job, and stayed responsible for one career, her own.
Back on the same runway in 2024
Victoria’s Secret brought the show back on October 15, 2024, in Brooklyn, six years after the last one.
Lima’s return was announced in a video with the brand in which she climbs into a taxi, tells the driver she is going home, then asks to be dropped at the Victoria’s Secret show. She had already been back on a catwalk three weeks before that, walking Schiaparelli in Paris on September 26, her first runway in six years. In Brooklyn she closed the opening segment and made a heart with her hands.
Banks closed the show itself, following a performance by Cher. She had not walked a runway in nearly 20 years, and the day before she posted that you are never too young to smize and never too old to dream. She later described the walk to Harper’s Bazaar as “a little bit of an out-of-body experience,” and told Drew Barrymore she had felt like a vessel out there rather than a model doing a job.
Two awards on one night in Beverly Hills
Six months later, on April 24, 2025, the Daily Front Row held its ninth Fashion Los Angeles Awards at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Beverly Johnson presented Banks with the Fashion Icon award. The UFC champion Amanda Nunes presented Lima with Fashion Comeback of the Year.
The citations are worth reading next to each other. One honored a reputation that had never lapsed, the other a career that stopped and restarted, and both went to women who had worked the same runway two decades earlier. WWD carried the full honoree list.
Why only Banks is answering questions
Netflix released Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model on February 16 of this year, a three part series revisiting how young women were treated on the show. Among those interviewed were Jay Manuel, J. Alexander and Nigel Barker, three longtime cast members Banks had fired after cycle 18. On June 13, Banks sued.
The complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California and names Netflix, EverWonder Studio and directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan. Her lawyers argue the edit left a false impression of her, broke the agreement she had signed, and used her image to promote the series in ways she never agreed to. Banks says she sat for an interview lasting three and a half hours, that roughly 16 minutes of it aired, and that what survived was “stripped of context and reassembled,” in the language of the filing. The passages where she took responsibility, they say, never made it in. Netflix has not filed its response, and the court set that deadline for August 14.
None of that is a finding against Banks. It is a lawsuit, and the allegations stay allegations until a judge or a jury says otherwise.
What is worth noticing is that Lima faces nothing comparable, and the reason has little to do with how either woman behaved. Nobody ever gave Lima authority over anyone else’s future, so no record exists of how she used it. A competition show that ran 24 cycles produces exactly that kind of record, in hours of footage, with the decisions on camera.
It is also the limit of what her story can settle. She met Banks as a fellow model at the same brand, where Banks had fame but nothing Lima needed from her. The women in the Netflix series knew her in a different role, as the person deciding who stayed. An answer about the first situation does not reach the second, however sincerely it is given.
What is confirmed for the 2026 show
Victoria’s Secret announced on July 16 that the next show moves to Los Angeles. Here is what the brand has said so far, and what it has not:
- Los Angeles is the host city, the first time since 2007
- Gigi Hadid is the only model named
- No date, venue or performers have been announced
- Neither Banks nor Lima has been confirmed, and neither has been ruled out
Banks, 52, joined Project Runway as a full time judge when season 22 premiered on Freeform on July 9. She is promoting a new SMiZE & DREAM release and waiting on Netflix.
Lima, 45, walked the 2025 show, covered Harper’s Bazaar Spain in February and worked the Cannes carpet in May wearing Chopard jewelry. Her Instagram account carries 53 posts and 19.5 million followers, close to three times the audience Banks has built across roughly 4,000 posts.
Lima has walked the last two shows. Banks walked in 2024 and sat out 2025. Netflix’s response is due first, on the 14th, and Victoria’s Secret has not said when in the fall the Los Angeles show will take place.
