Dutch Treat

That warm glow radiating off the page is Romee Strijd, Victoria’s Secret’s heavenly girl next door

- Mitch Moxley

That smile. It’s the first thing you notice about Romee Strijd. There’s something about it that puts you at ease, makes you forget you’re chatting with a six-foot-tall Victoria’s Secret Angel. A bona fide supermodel. As she sips an iced latte in a blissfully air-conditioned coffee shop in Chelsea on a sweltering New York day, there’s something about the 21-year-old’s enormous, effortless smile that tells you none of this has gone to her head—not the jet-setting to Europe and the Caribbean, not the Michael Bay commercials, not the rubbing shoulders with celebrities. There’s something about it that says, in a lovely Dutch accent, I could take it or leave it. There’s something about it that says that despite being one of the hottest models on the planet— in both senses—she’s still just a girl from Holland.

Strijd was only 13 years old when she was discovered in Amsterdam on the street with her mom. Tall and slim with hair the color of a Dutch wheat field, even at that age she was a star in the making. But she was too young, too nervous, and she turned down the offer. Over the next two years, Strijd couldn’t get the idea out of her mind, watching modeling reality shows and endlessly looping Victoria’s Secret fashion specials on her laptop. She’d get so excited she would sashay up and down the hallway of her family’s home in the Hague, with her mother looking on and saying, “Keep dreaming.”