Kobe Bryant's Daughter and Three Generations of Chinese Models Shared the Victoria's Secret Runway

The Victoria's Secret show reliably produces two different news cycles, one in America and one in China, and this year's edition served both at once. On Monday the show trended across Weibo on the strength of an American debut and a Chinese homecoming: Natalia Bryant, Kobe Bryant's eldest daughter, walked the runway for the first time, while the three Chinese models booked for the show — Liu Wen, Xi Mengyao and He Cong — turned their appearances into a quiet scorecard of where Chinese modeling has been over the past two decades.

The American hook is Natalia Bryant, at 23 already a familiar figure to basketball fans as the eldest of Kobe Bryant's daughters. The basketball forum Hupu relayed the Yahoo Sports report of her booking, noting that she is signed with IMG, graduated from the University of Southern California's film school, and had walked for Versace before adding Victoria's Secret. The comment under it that captured the mood ran: "Twenty-three. After Versace, now Victoria's Secret. Signed with IMG, film school at USC done, career and studies both in hand. Her mother watching from the stands — if Kobe were here to see it, imagine how proud he would be." Bryant died in a helicopter crash in 2020, and the milestones of the daughter he left behind have been followed closely by the basketball world ever since.

The Chinese conversation, though, was mostly about the three women sharing the runway with her. Liu Wen, the veteran fans call "Big Cousin," was walking the show for the tenth time — a run of constancy that one post summed up as "a perfect ten." He Cong, part of the post-1995 generation of Chinese models, was appearing for only the second time, and did more than fill a slot: she opened one of the show's segments, which her fans describe as a first for an Asian model. And Xi Mengyao returned after eight years away, her seventh time walking for the brand — the most narratively loaded booking of the three.

Internationally, Xi is remembered for an unlucky moment: a stumble on the runway at the brand's 2017 show in Shanghai, performed in front of a home crowd, which met with sympathy rather than mockery. In the years since, she married Marco Ho, a son of Macau's Ho family, had two children, and stepped back from the runway. Her return was framed as exactly that. "This is a come-back for me," she told Chinese media. "I can't wait for my daughter to see it and say, Mommy is so pretty." Her husband posted video of the walk with the caption "proud of you, pride of the family" — a post that drew more than 5,000 likes — and fans crowned her "Xi Fei returns to the palace" (奚妃回宫), casting her as a dowager empress reclaiming her court. The gilded wings of one look supplied the hashtag's poetry: Xi Mengyao's gilded wings (奚梦瑶鎏金翅膀).

One widely shared observation pulled the three bookings into a single arc: Liu Wen has never left the show; Xi Mengyao left and came back; He Cong is just arriving. Three women at three stages of the same career on one runway — as the post put it, "three people walking their own paths who ended up on the same show, like a thread that had been spliced back together." It is also a measure of how the brand's arithmetic has changed: a Chinese model's job at Victoria's Secret used to be to walk it; this year one of them was handed a segment to open.

The runway glow sits against a patchier backdrop for the brand in China. Its local offices have had a rougher month: a Victoria's Secret China employee left the company after being denied leave for her mother's cancer surgery, a workplace controversy that drew its own wave of sympathy. The two stories barely touch, but together they show a brand fighting on two fronts in its second-largest market — defending its workplace reputation off the runway while buying relevance with the kind of casting, a basketball legend's daughter and three generations of Chinese models, that Chinese feeds actually talk about.