Adriana Lima and Kendall Jenner have shared a runway at least five times since 2015, from Versace to three separate Victoria’s Secret Fashion Shows. Most coverage of the two models comes back to a single moment between them: a November 2016 interview where Lima was asked to respond to years of criticism that Jenner had not earned her place in the industry.
In that interview, Lima never actually settles the question she was asked. She gives an answer about Jenner’s personality, not her modeling. That distinction got lost at the time, and it helps explain why the criticism around Jenner kept coming back for years afterward, even with Lima’s defense already on record.
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What Lima Told E! News in 2016
By late 2016, Lima had walked sixteen Victoria’s Secret Fashion Shows and ranked second on Forbes’ list of the world’s highest paid models, behind only Gisele Bรผndchen. E! News asked her directly about the criticism aimed at Jenner, and she didn’t dodge the question.
She said she had worked with Jenner before, “like Versace and also with Victoria’s Secret.” She called her “very sweet and very nice.” She credited her effort, saying Jenner “works as hard as we do.” Then she gave her reason for thinking Jenner would succeed. Victoria’s Secret, she said, is “all about personality, and she has her own personality.”
Lima never says Jenner walks well in that answer. She doesn’t mention technique, posture, or any of the specific runway skills her critics said Jenner lacked. She was asked about qualification and answered about temperament instead, which meant the actual question sitting underneath the criticism never really got addressed, not by Lima and not, as far as the public record shows, by Jenner herself.
Where the Criticism Started
Lima wasn’t responding to a stray comment. The criticism had a specific starting point, and it kept resurfacing.
In November 2014, a model named Arisce Wanzer published an open letter addressed directly to Jenner, who had recently been named the new face of Estรฉe Lauder. Wanzer, a working model who is transgender, wrote about the unpaid castings, the visa paperwork, and the crash diets other models went through trying to land a single show. Jenner’s path into the same rooms ran through her family’s name instead. The letter spread within days. Bustle and USC’s Annenberg Media both covered it, and reaction split about evenly, between people who thought Wanzer had a real point about the industry and people who thought she was punishing Jenner for an advantage she never asked for.
The same argument came back less than a year after Lima’s interview. On September 8, 2017, Daily Front Row named Jenner its Fashion Icon of the Decade at New York Fashion Week. Commenters again compared her to models who had spent years building a career without a famous last name behind them. Lima was asked about the award soon after, in an interview for Sway’s Universe, and defended Jenner once more.
The Runways They’ve Shared Since 2015
Underneath the interviews sits a runway record most coverage of these two skips over entirely.
| Show | Year | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Versace | 2016 | Milan Fashion Week |
| Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show | 2015 | New York |
| Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show | 2016 | Paris |
| Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show | 2018 | New York |
| Schiaparelli, Spring 2025 collection | September 2024 | Paris Fashion Week |
The last row is the one most articles about Lima and Jenner leave out. Six years after her final Victoria’s Secret show, Lima returned to a runway for Schiaparelli in September 2024. Jenner walked the same show, alongside Irina Shayk and Candice Swanepoel. The two women at the center of that 2014 argument were together again a decade after it started, years after anyone was still publicly asking whether Jenner belonged there.
Where Adriana Lima and Kendall Jenner Stand in 2026
Neither woman’s biggest news this year has much to do with a runway.
Lima spent 2025 and early 2026 building her public presence around legacy work rather than new bookings. She returned for Victoria’s Secret’s relaunched show in October 2024, and again in 2025. She appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar Spain’s February 2026 “Red” issue. She has also stayed visible through FIFA, where she became the organization’s first Global Fan Ambassador in 2023, a role that drew criticism from former FIFA official Moya Dodd but kept Lima in front of an audience well outside fashion.
Jenner’s defining story this year came from a liquor company, not a fashion house. In April 2026, Sazerac, the spirits company behind Buffalo Trace and Fireball, took a minority stake in her tequila brand, 818, and became its exclusive U.S. distributor. The deal was announced the same month Sazerac was reportedly offering close to fifteen billion dollars to buy the maker of Jack Daniel’s. Jenner had already been named Forbes’ highest paid model twice, in 2017 and 2022. Ten years after Lima was asked to defend her, Jenner’s career runs almost entirely on things that have nothing to do with a runway.
Neither side of the 2014 argument ever really won. Wanzer’s complaint about industry access was never disproven, and Lima’s answer about personality was never really a defense of Jenner’s technique either. The argument simply stopped mattering once both women moved into work it never covered: brand deals, a magazine cover, an ambassador title, a spirits company built around a tequila brand. None of it required either of them to prove anything about a runway.
