Brooklyn — Bella Hadid returned to the brand’s loudest stage with a finale calibrated for the age of the vertical screen, a walk that turned the Brooklyn Navy Yard into a theater of pause buttons and replay loops. The show’s cameras lingered; the crowd rose; and for a few charged minutes the night revolved around a supermodel who understands exactly how images travel now. Gigi Hadid was there too, opening and closing key passages, but the story that fused nostalgia to the present was Bella’s, a measured stride in towering wings, the kind of set piece that keeps runway mythology alive. Inside a vast soundstage on the waterfront, the company tried to prove it could keep spectacle and shed the blinders that once broke it, an argument about reinvention told in sequins, choreography, and live music. For New York fashion diehards, it also read as a homecoming, a runway reboot in Brooklyn that treats the city less as backdrop than engine.
The night stitched together two ambitions: make a broadcast-scale event that functions as content in a thousand smaller windows, and center faces that audiences have followed across platforms for years. Bella Hadid’s name recurred in whispers before the house lights dropped, a barometer of how much expectation the brand still hangs on a single finale. When she finally appeared, the runway slowed for a few seconds, the kind of pause that tells you the cameras are already imagining tomorrow’s thumbnails. Gigi, meanwhile, moved like a seasoned master of tempo, quick where the lighting wanted velocity, still when the frame demanded a still life. Together, the sisters gave the show a narrative spine, a familiar rivalry rewritten as a duet.
Music did more than fill transitions; it defined the room. The bookings favored women who can command an arena and a feed at once. An all-female musical lineup, confirmed in the company’s own announcement, built the night’s rhythm: Karol G’s stadium heat, Madison Beer’s pop precision, Missy Elliott’s time-bending swagger, and TWICE’s metronomic choreography. Each performance was cut with a video director’s instincts for loopable peaks, the better to live again in clips.
The sisters’ segment delivered the evening’s most photographed sequence. Early in the program, Gigi surfaced in a sugar-light palette, then later reappeared in plush white with sculpted wings; Bella answered in a silver-fringe look paired with white floral wings that caught light like a constellation. The moment is preserved in a magazine’s runway photo log that has already made the rounds, a plush-wing finale and silver-fringe sequence that reads like an argument for why this format still matters.
What the cameras couldn’t show was the literal weight of the picture. After the show, it emerged that the finale wings were heavy enough to slow even a veteran’s stride. The figure, about 50 pounds, was revealed in a follow-up, a detail that explains both the deliberate pacing on the turn and the quick online debate about form versus physics. Trade coverage added context the next day, noting that the model pushed back at critics who read the measured walk as misstep; the rejoinder landed as firmly as the image itself, and was tracked by an entertainment industry outlet’s coverage of the wings’ weight.
The casting told a complementary story about who belongs on a runway in 2025. The booking that traveled farthest beyond fashion circles was Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese, who stepped into the lineup with the poise of an athlete used to floodlights. Reese’s appearance, paced to the crowd with a feathered stole and all the confidence of a two-time All-Star, has already become the night’s most instructive proof that fandom is fungible across arenas. A wire report offered the baseline confirmation that matters for the record: Reese became the first professional athlete to walk the runway. The booking also lines up with the brand’s effort to speak to audiences who measure excellence in more than one domain, and it resonated with a crossover thread we’ve been tracking, the WNBA star’s crossover with a Juicy capsule that prefigured her walk.
If a single face supplied the celebrity shock, it was Emily Ratajkowski, a veteran of campaigns but new to this particular stage. Her entrance, cut in orchid-shaped wings and a saturated palette designed for screens, doubled as a brand milestone, a high-profile first that felt pre-edited for the post-show carousel. Pop culture outlets recorded the moment as a first-ever walk for the brand, useful not just as trivia but as an index of how aggressively the company is expanding its orbit.
Distribution functioned as a thesis statement. This is not a legacy broadcast looking for a slot; it is a live property built to flood the grid. Coverage of the Prime Video livestream from Brooklyn sketched the larger frame, how a platform once known for prestige series is now the bridge between a runway and a mass audience, in a report that doubled as a venue-and-streaming snapshot. For the service-minded, a guide laid out start times and the spread across platforms, a start time and platforms recap that acknowledges how many viewers now arrive by link, not schedule. The company’s own channels acted as the glue between performances and sales, a playbook the brand has leaned into since it returned to New York last year.
What has evolved since the show’s broadcast-era pomp is the relationship between character and costume. The camera lingers closer and longer; faces carry more of the story than rigging ever will. That was true in the way Gigi read the crowd on approach to the pit, a head tilt that recognized the bank of lenses waiting to capture the still that would follow. It was true in the way Bella held breath through the turn, converting the weight of her finale into drama rather than drag. The director’s cut will thread those moments together into an arc that flatters both, the kind of edit that blurs the line between live show and series episode.
Behind that edit, the after-party operated as a second stage. Post-show images sketched a continuation rather than a coda, and the best of them made the case that the sisters are not merely cast but co-authors of the brand’s iconography now. For readers tracing that grammar, who wore what, and what choices say about a pivot away from the old spectacle, our culture desk filed a sister-affair close-read from the after-party that speaks to the continuity between stage and street.
Inside the room, one could feel the staging is being reverse-engineered for mobile. Segments are cut to lengths that reward repeat viewing; lighting favors clean silhouettes; and the sound mix keeps vocals present even under crowd noise. A music magazine described the night as a sprint of performances, a four-act set that delivered stadium scale, but the larger success was how those acts threaded through cast entries without stealing the show’s argument: that in 2025, the runway is a content machine, and the content is the product.
The front row, as usual, doubled as endorsement. A style title’s gallery mapped the celebrity geography neatly, a front row that ran deep into the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and threaded a needle between nostalgia and novelty: names from the show’s broadcast heyday beside faces of a digital-native audience who learned fashion through clips.
None of this erases the questions that trailed the brand into its hiatus. It does, however, suggest a change in how those questions are answered. The cast reads wider, in body, in background, in résumé, than it did in the aughts. The styling, while still maximal where the cameras demand it, indulges subtler decisions in close-ups. Beauty language has moved, too. Where once a single cheekbone aesthetic dominated, debates over sculpt and contour now acknowledge a spectrum; our desk has followed those shifts in coverage of sculpted cheek contours and the cultural weather around them. On this runway, those arguments showed up in faces that felt particular rather than interchangeable.
Then there’s the matter of virality, a logic unto itself. A collectible craze can make a stranger’s shelf feel like a stage; a well-timed backstage video can lift a niche detail into the mainstream. The night’s best images had that energy, a wink before the turn, a look back that reads as a thank-you, and they will circulate the way small objects do when they mean more than they cost. If you’ve watched how micro-trends pass through celebrity hands into the wider culture, you’ve seen the pattern we documented in a short on a celebrity-driven collectible craze that behaved like a referendum on intimacy. The runway borrowed the same intimacy, just scaled for a room.
For all the talk of algorithms, what carries a show like this is craft, not only in tailoring and fabrication but in the construction of a set piece that can survive the scrutiny of a freeze frame. Bella Hadid’s finale, ultimately, worked because it asked you to see the machinery and the myth at once: a heavy build balanced by posture, a long corridor condensed into a single, shared second. It is a reminder that even in an era of infinite images, rarity still exists. You can feel it when a room stops to watch a person become a picture in real time.
That is the tension the brand will keep negotiating if it plans to hold this date on the calendar: broaden the tent without lowering the tentpole. Reasonable people will argue about where this edition landed on that spectrum. What few would contest is that the pieces are in place for a season that belongs as much to the editors as to the designers, the people who will decide which seconds of the night deserve to be looped into a story.
Outside the venue, the noise was a mix of fans and phones. Inside, the pink-lit aisles moved fast after the finale, their current pulling guests toward exits and cameras toward upload. The company, for its part, has made it easy to catch up, cross-posting highlights and dangling longer cuts for anyone who missed the live window, a strategy spelled out in the brand’s own coverage hub and multiplied by service journalism that explains how to watch. For readers who landed here via search, the essential details were clear before the lights came up: this was New York, this was live, and this was designed to be replayed.
By the time the last guests reached the curb, the night had already been translated: into galleries, into timelines, into little rectangles that can carry the weight of wings without telling you how heavy they were. Bella Hadid’s name sat near the top of the explore pages for a reason. She gave the show its defining image, not just because she wore it, but because she could hold still long enough for the image to imprint. The siblings built the frame around it, the performers laid in the sound, the cameras did the rest.
That leaves the work between seasons: fewer headlines, more fittings, better pacing, the calculus of which names to foreground and where to pause so the new faces have room to register. If the brand keeps the balance, a runway that remembers what the audience loved and acknowledges what it wants now, it will have a credible claim on this slot next fall. For this week, the ledger reads as follows: a finale that earned its superlatives, a set list that earned its ovations, and a proof of life for a format many had written off as irreconcilable with the present. The pink-hued mythology is intact. The question, as ever, is whether the next edition can write a better sentence with the same words.
