We unfortunately have to talk about “the dress.”
Not the dress that taught many on the internet about how brains process color. Not Jennifer Lopez’s dress that spawned Google Image Search.
In Brooklyn Peltz Beckham’s stunning revelations about his family estrangement, one minor detail was his mom allegedly ghosting on making his wife’s wedding dress.
Do Nicola’s own statements dispute what her husband is now saying? Let’s take a look.
What is the truth?
One of the (honestly lesser) details from Brooklyn’s explosive Instagram Story series on his family involved his wife, Nicola, and her wedding dress.
According to the 26-year-old chef, Victoria had been planning to make a wedding dress for the big day.
He said that she backed out “at the eleventh hour.”
Nicola ended up wearing a custom Valentino Haute Couture gown for her April 2022 ceremony.
This is not the sort of dress that you buy at the last minute a week before the wedding. This would have taken a long time to craft.
In fact, according to Vogue, Nicola spent at least a year in consultation with former Valentino creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli’s team.
Nicola’s stylist at the time even shared that the process was “the ultimate couture experience.”
Brooklyn’s then-fiancee traveled to Rome twice, and had two fittings in the United States.
“Seeing all the runway dresses in real life was so magic,” Nicola gushed to Vogue before her wedding.
She raved: “It looked like someone’s dream closet.”
Does this mean that the claims about Victoria backing out were a lie?
One would think that, if Nicola had an entire year (or most of it) to get a gorgeous custom gown, she would by definition have had plenty of notice on the dress.
However, some have suggested that Victoria’s would-be dress would have been one of the gowns, and the Valentino would have been another.
(We have to keep in mind that the Beckham family is wealthy, and Nicola’s family is even wealthier, making absurdities like “multiple wedding dresses” seem like normal choices)
Others have put forward another theory: that Victoria was going to make the dress, dropped out, and that the Valentino gown was the last-minute choice.
Speaking as someone who considers “the week before” to be last-minute for even a simple Thanksgiving dish, it’s not hard to see how a year or less of notice on a custom high-end wedding gown could feel like a four-alarm fire.
We should also acknowledge that the dress issue did not happen (if it happened) in a vacuum.
The night before the wedding, Brooklyn said that his parents emphasized that Nicola is “not blood” and “not family.”
(Not to blow this out of proportion, but that sounds like Targaryen clownery, even without the wedding dance neck-nuzzling that surely summoned the withered spirit of Sigmund Freud)
Victoria also stole Brooklyn and Nicola’s first dance in what sounds like a traumatic incident that, all by itself, could more than justify going no-contact. (Not that you need to justify it, but you know)
When it’s all part of a larger pattern of your immediate family treating your fiancee (and then wife) as a threat or even an enemy without cause or provocation, every detail stands out, and every decision feels personal.
What’s behind the attempts to unravel this dress timeline?
Is the coverage of Victoria possibly not being quite so last minute about the dress organic, or part of coordinated PR pushback by the Beckham family?
That is difficult to say. Plenty of people could (and are) looking into things on their own. (That includes us here at THG)
Muddying the waters about the dress makes sense, strategically speaking.
In contrast, Victoria stealing the first dance was so inappropriate and outrageous that there were reports about that already — reports that many had discounted because it sounded too awful, too absurd to be true.
When you’ve done something indefensible, it’s easier to try to poke holes in something else.