August 2019
Brazil's 22-year-old Valentina Sampaio posted a photo on her Instagram profile showing her backstage during a Victoria's Secret photo shoot.
Image from Twitter
With the photo on Instagram, the model wrote several hashtags, including #diversity and #VSPink. By this she means the Pink lingerie collection from Victoria's Secret, which is mainly aimed at students.
A day later, Sampaio posted another video, writing, "Never stop dreaming."
There is a lot of enthusiasm under the photos of Sampaio. For example, actress Laverne Cox writes: "Wow, finally!" And Lais Ribeiro, another Victoria's Secret model, tweets: "This makes me so happy!"
Last year, Victoria's Secret came under fire because the brand's marketing boss, Ed Razek, had said that the lingerie brand "would have no place for transgender models". The shows should be seen as 'fairy tales', and trans people shouldn't belong in that.
After much outcry, Razek apologized via the official Victoria's Secret Twitter account. “My comment about transgender people on the Victoria's Secret show came across as insensitive. Sorry about that. To be clear, we do want to hire a transgender model. There have been many transgender castings, but like many others, they didn't make it But it was never about their gender. I admire their journey towards who they really are."
Sampaio is not the first time in the news in this way. For example, in 2017 she was the trans woman who was on the cover of Vogue. That was on the French version of the magazine at the time. After that she was also on the cover in Brazil and in Germany.