TWICE at the 2025 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show — First K-Pop Girl Group on the Runway, and What That Distinction Means

TWICE performs at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show today — the first K-pop girl group to take the runway at the iconic American fashion event. Four members — Nayeon, Momo, Jihyo, and Tzuyu — take the stage at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn, New York, performing "This Is For" and "Strategy (feat. Megan Thee Stallion)" for an audience alongside Missy Elliott, Karol G, and Madison Beer. The timing, ten days after TWICE released their 10th anniversary album "TEN: The Story Goes On," positions the VS Fashion Show appearance as the punctuation mark on a decade that has moved progressively outward from K-pop's domestic ecosystem into the global mainstream.

The historical context matters. BLACKPINK's Lisa performed at the VS Fashion Show 2024 — the show's return after a six-year hiatus — as the first K-pop artist to take the runway. That individual milestone established the precedent. TWICE's appearance today is the next step: a K-pop group performance on the same stage, a distinction that shifts the framework from individual crossover to group-level representation. The difference is meaningful not because one is more significant than the other, but because it indicates the degree to which K-pop acts have become normalized within the VS Fashion Show's performer selection logic, rather than treated as novelty inclusions.

The K-Pop and VS Fashion Show Progression

The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show operated from 1995 through 2018, when low ratings and public controversy around inclusivity prompted the brand to suspend the format. The show's 2024 return was designed around a different aesthetic and cultural positioning: broader performer diversity, more varied musical acts, and a deliberate acknowledgment that the brand's audience had changed during the six-year absence. Lisa's 2024 performance — herself already one of the most globally followed solo artists of 2024 — was the K-pop entry point into that new framework.

TWICE's 2025 selection follows a different logic than Lisa's. BLACKPINK's Lisa is a solo artist with a significant independent global profile in the Western market, built through music videos that have accumulated hundreds of millions of YouTube views and chart entries on the Global 200. TWICE is a nine-person group whose commercial base is built through a different mechanism: sustained North American album purchases by ONCE, their fandom, generating seven consecutive Billboard 200 top-10 entries across their recent discography. The brand decision to select TWICE for 2025 reflects a reading of their fan base as commercially engaged in a way that extends beyond streaming — a market presence the VS brand is positioning to reach.

Song Selection and What It Signals

TWICE's set list — "This Is For" followed by "Strategy (feat. Megan Thee Stallion)" — is a deliberate pair. "This Is For," the title track from their July 2025 full-length album, is the ONCE-directed album they released as their seventh consecutive Billboard 200 top-10 entry. "Strategy," the single featuring Megan Thee Stallion, is their most explicitly Western-market-oriented release: a collaboration with a US rapper whose audience overlaps only partially with TWICE's core ONCE base. Together the two songs trace the range of TWICE's 2025 commercial positioning — one track for the fandom that built the decade, one for the audience they are trying to reach beyond it.

The VS Fashion Show provides a distribution mechanism for "Strategy" that most K-pop acts cannot access: US television broadcast and the associated media cycle of fashion and entertainment coverage that treats VS Fashion Show performances as culture-defining moments rather than simply promotional appearances. Whether that exposure translates into US streaming gains for "Strategy" is a question that the weeks following the show will begin to answer. For now, the performance establishes that TWICE's crossover infrastructure has developed to the point where they are being selected for it rather than seeking it.

The commercial implications extend beyond the broadcast itself. Victoria's Secret Fashion Show performances historically generate sustained media coverage across fashion, entertainment, and general-interest outlets for weeks following the live event — a visibility distribution channel that operates differently from K-pop's typical media ecosystem. TWICE reaching that channel as a group, rather than through an individual member's solo activities, carries implications for how non-K-pop audiences encounter and process K-pop acts: as groups with coherent identities, rather than simply as collections of charismatic individuals.

TWICE's Position at the Ten-Year Mark

The VS Fashion Show appearance follows the October 10 release of "TEN: The Story Goes On" by five days. That proximity is not coincidental. JYP Entertainment and TWICE have structured their 10th anniversary around a series of moments rather than a single promotional campaign: the anniversary album, the VS Fashion Show, and a world tour that has placed them on global stages simultaneously. Each element addresses a different part of their fanbase and a different tier of mainstream cultural validation.

What is particular about the VS Fashion Show as a platform is that it operates outside K-pop's typical media infrastructure. Music shows, Billboard charts, and streaming algorithms are all mechanisms that K-pop fanbases know how to activate. The VS Fashion Show audience includes a segment that does not follow Korean chart cycles or participate in organized streaming campaigns — people who encounter TWICE through the fashion-entertainment convergence that the show produces. Whether TWICE converts any portion of that audience into committed listeners will be one of the more interesting data points to track over the months following tonight's performance. A decade in, the story, as their anniversary album insists, continues to go on.