The Bollywood-Britney Mashup That Stole Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2025

If you’ve been alive long enough to remember when Toxic was the soundtrack to every bad decision of the early 2000s, and when Ek Duje Ke Liye reruns could make your parents weep into their chai, you’ll understand why what happened at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2025 felt like some kind of cultural fever dream. Britney Spears’ latex-laced pop classic collided mid-runway with legendary composer duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal’s Tere Mere Beech Mein from 1981, and for a brief moment in New York City, the world stopped scrolling and started listening.

The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show has always been part spectacle, part controversy, and part guilty pleasure: the high-gloss cousin of a music festival that also sells lingerie. After years of reinvention, the 2025 edition returned this October looking more cinematic than ever. The brand had clearly decided that if it was going to reclaim its throne, it might as well do it in 4K, with live performances, light installations, and choreography that would make even Broadway blush.

The lineup was nothing short of a global playlist: Rapper Missy Elliott dropping verses like confetti, popstar Karol G bringing Latin heat, and K-pop sensation TWICE making the crowd lose its collective mind. Yet, none of these heavyweights ended up being the night’s talking point. What truly detonated the internet was the music that accompanied one of the mid-show sequences: a mashup that paired Britney Spears’ Toxic with the Hindi cult classic Tere Mere Beech Mein.

Now, this mashup isn’t entirely new. It’s been floating around online for a few years, because Britney's original track sampled the 1981 Bollywood gaana. Both are, in their own ways, erotic ballads of tension: one wrapped in synths and danger, the other in sitar and tragedy. But hearing it boom through the speakers of one of fashion’s most global stages was something else entirely. The two tracks (one sung by a Louisiana pop princess, the other by India’s beloved playback icon S. P. Balasubrahmanyam) found an uncanny rhythm together.

The mashup began subtly, with Tere Mere Beech Mein's iconic violin riff slicing through the air as models glided under strobe lights as models sashayed down the ramp. Then, almost imperceptibly, Toxic began to bloom underneath, its melody threading through the bassline. For a second, you didn’t know what was happening — only that it was both familiar and disorienting. And then, as the two songs merged perfectly on the downbeat, and the crowd gasped.

Pink parade at the fashion show (Getty Images)

Within hours, clips of the moment had flooded social media, with captions ranging from “India won again” to “This is the globalization we signed up for.” The mashup even trended in both India and the US, pulling in nostalgic millennials, Gen Z remixers, and music nerds. What was fascinating wasn’t just the novelty of East meeting West (that’s been happening for decades) but how right this particular pairing felt.

Maybe it’s because both songs share the same emotional core. Toxic was always about danger disguised as desire, and Tere Mere Beech Mein was, in its time, a rebellion against propriety, a cry of longing that scandalized polite society. Put them together, and you get a sonic mirror: two worlds singing the same truth in different languages. The runway itself seemed to recognize this. The models strutted not with the usual air of unattainability, but with the kind of rhythm that comes when music becomes memory. The lighting shifted from crimson to gold, echoing Bollywood romance and pop danger.

Victoria’s Secret, of course, knew what it was doing. The brand’s recent reinvention strategy has leaned heavily into inclusivity and artistic risk-taking. A song like Tere Mere Beech Mein, once confined to living room cassette players, had now strutted down a Manhattan runway alongside Britney’s electro-pop perfection.

The fact that Victoria’s Secret, a brand once accused of tone-deafness, is now spotlighting an Indian love song from the ’80s says a lot about where global culture is headed. By the time the last note faded and the models took their final walk, the internet was already buzzing.

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