Keani Mapulani Baitman was standing on a farm in Maui, surrounded by more than a hundred trees her family tends by hand, when the call came. She was born and raised in Hawaii, had been modeling since she was five years old, and had survived a car accident and the loss of family in the Maui fires. She describes the runway as the only place she feels no fear, no anxiety, nothing but locked-in presence. That quality, visible the moment she stepped into an open call in Chicago, is what put her on a flight to New York City for the final ten spots in Victoria's Secret‘s open search for its next Angel.
The search, which drew more than 100,000 applicants, had already moved through three cities before landing in Chicago for its final open call. The pressure on that last stop was real. Walking into the room with the applicants, casting director Scott Lipps put it plainly to his team: ‘I just feel this immense pressure that Chicago really needs to deliver.’ Every woman they had found so far came with a qualifier. Beautiful, but the walk needs work. Beautiful, but no photo shoot experience. Beautiful, but too polished in a way that reads as social media performance rather than runway presence.
Chicago showed up
The city delivered. Among the women who walked through that day: Kayn Shepard, from a town in New Jersey so small it is not even a square mile, who had been posting runway walk practice videos on TikTok and had already declared publicly that becoming a Victoria's Secret model was an attainable goal. A news anchor who practiced by clearing her kitchen and living room furniture, placing a mirror at the far end, and walking toward it with her father watching tutorials alongside her. A woman originally from Cameroon who now works as a program manager for a nonprofit serving young immigrants in Maine while attending college full time, and who first encountered Victoria's Secret by walking into a mall with friends after arriving in the United States. Solange, whose long stride caught immediate attention and who, that same morning, had only just met a fellow applicant at a bus stop and immediately felt, as she described it, that she had found her person.
After four cities, the panel worked through a deliberate and sometimes contested selection process. Tatiana drew near-unanimous enthusiasm. Solange was called ‘the whole package’ without debate. Cassandra came up quickly. The conversation over Kayn went back and forth, with some panelists marking her as a ‘maybe’ while others pointed to her social media fluency and her ability to handle intense public scrutiny. Emma from Houston kept coming up as someone with something genuinely cool about her that was hard to articulate. The final tenth spot went to Kayn after a separate conversation with a trusted advisor who pressed on one specific question: can she handle the spotlight?
Ten women, one hotel, one room of racks
When the calls went out, the reactions were unscripted. One finalist stopped mid-sentence to say ‘let me stop screaming and listen.’ Another, reached with the news, apologized for crying and was told not to apologize. Keani, when told she was part of the final ten, said quietly that this does not feel like real life.
In New York, the ten women arrived at the same hotel and met each other for the first time, comparing home cities, asking whether anyone knew what challenges were coming, and landing on a loose consensus: ‘they did a good job.’ The group included women from the Bronx, Salt Lake City, Cameroon, Hawaii, and New Jersey. One finalist, upon realizing another woman in the room was also originally from Cameroon, immediately asked her to call her mother.
The first formal day brought a fitting, with racks upon racks of lingerie and shoes and jewelry, and a session on the runway where the stakes became clear fast. As Lipps told the group directly: ‘We will be eliminating as we go. At the end, there will only be one.’
The escalator that started it all
Keani Mapulani Baitman, standing in that New York hotel room, was the woman who had been spotted not during an official audition moment but while coming down an escalator at the Chicago venue. Someone from the team saw her and flagged her on the spot. The escalator, as it was later called in the room, turned out to be working in her favor.
Back home in Maui, her family’s farm has about a hundred trees on land they describe through a Hawaiian concept that translates roughly as: if you take care of the land, the land takes care of you. She said she has always been scared of taking up too much space in ordinary life. On a runway, that fear disappears entirely. What happens between those two versions of her is exactly what the next phase of this process is designed to figure out.
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