She wanted to be a ballerina. Instead, a chance encounter at a South African flea market turned a teenage farm girl from KwaZulu-Natal into one of the most recognisable faces Victoria’s Secret has ever crowned — the platinum-blonde, blue-eyed Angel who wore the brand’s coveted Fantasy Bra, ranked for years among the world’s highest-paid models, and then walked away from the wings to build her own eco-conscious swimwear empire. Candice Swanepoel is the rare supermodel who became as well known for what she founded as for what she modelled.
From a Mooi River farm to the runway
Candice Susan Swanepoel was born on 20 October 1988 in Mooi River, in what was then Natal Province, South Africa, and grew up on her family’s farm in an Afrikaner household — her father of Afrikaner roots by way of Zimbabwe, her mother of British origin. As a child her ambitions had nothing to do with fashion: she trained seriously in ballet and assumed she would dance professionally. That changed at fifteen, when a model scout spotted her at a flea market in Durban. She began modelling in 2003 and, still a teenager, moved to Europe to work the international circuit.
The rise was swift. Within a few years of being discovered she was working the European shows and appearing in major editorials, her clean, sunlit, distinctly South African beauty standing out in a field then dominated by Brazilian and Eastern European faces. By her early twenties she had become a magazine and campaign regular across many of the biggest fashion and beauty brands — the kind of dependable, camera-ready presence that designers and photographers booked again and again, and the groundwork that would soon make her one of the most visible models in the world.
The work: Angel, Fantasy Bra and a decade at the top
Swanepoel’s defining association is with Victoria’s Secret. She walked the brand’s runway from the late 2000s and was officially named an Angel in 2010, joining its elite contracted roster alongside Adriana Lima and Alessandra Ambrosio. She fronted the Victoria’s Secret Swim catalogue and, in 2013, was chosen to wear the coveted Fantasy Bra at the annual fashion show — the single greatest honour the brand bestows, reserved for its biggest stars. The recognition translated into elite earning power: Swanepoel was a perennial fixture on Forbes’ list of the world’s highest-paid models through the first half of the 2010s, her annual income climbing well into seven figures.
For the better part of a decade she was one of the defining images of the Victoria’s Secret era — a fixture of its televised fashion shows, its swim campaigns and its billboards — at a time when those shows were among the most-watched spectacles in fashion. To be named an Angel in that period was to become a globally recognised face almost overnight, and Swanepoel, with her particular brand of bright, healthy glamour, was among the handful the brand built its identity around. When the show returned from hiatus in 2024 and again in 2025, she was back on the runway, a bridge between that bombshell era and the brand’s more inclusive present.
Building Tropic of C
In 2018, as Victoria’s Secret wound down its swim line, Swanepoel seized a long-held ambition and launched her own brand: Tropic of C, an eco-lifestyle and swimwear label. She drew on her decade and a half in front of the camera for its design instincts and on her global travels for its aesthetic — sculptural, minimal, colour- and texture-forward pieces “influenced by nature, inspired by the female form.” Sustainability sits at its core, with the label an early adopter of regenerated, eco-conscious fabrics. The venture reframed her public identity from Angel to founder-CEO, placing her among a wave of supermodels building businesses rather than merely fronting them. The arc has a neat symmetry: the Angel who lost her swim platform when Victoria’s Secret stepped back from the category returned, years later, as a brand partner to the very company she once modelled for.
The Private Side
Swanepoel’s long-term partner was the Brazilian model Hermann Nicoli, whom she met in Paris at seventeen and dated for nearly a decade. The couple announced their engagement in August 2015 and had two sons, Anacã (born October 2016) and Ariel (born June 2018). Though engaged, they never married, and they separated in November 2018, shortly after the birth of their second son. Since the split Swanepoel has been the primary caregiver, raising the boys largely between New York and Brazil while Nicoli keeps a low public profile. Away from the runway she is also a committed philanthropist, serving since 2019 as a global ambassador for mothers2mothers, a charity working toward an HIV-free generation of children and mothers across Africa.
Earnings and net worth
As a long-serving Victoria’s Secret Angel and the founder of a growing swimwear label, Swanepoel ranks among the more financially successful models of her generation. Wealth trackers estimate her fortune in the tens of millions of dollars, built on her years of Forbes-listed modelling income and her ownership stake in Tropic of C — though such figures are unofficial third-party estimates rather than disclosed or audited numbers, and should be read as approximate.
Where she is now
Swanepoel remains highly active on both fronts. She walked the revived Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2024 and 2025, and Tropic of C continues to expand, including an ongoing swimwear collaboration with Victoria’s Secret. Between modelling, running her brand, her sustainability advocacy and her charity work, she has settled into a dual role few of her peers have managed — supermodel and founder at once — all while raising her two sons. Few models of the Victoria’s Secret generation have navigated the industry’s seismic shifts as deftly — from the height of the televised-spectacle era through its collapse and tentative revival — or turned a decade on the runway so cleanly into a business that may yet outlast the wings that first made her famous.