Nicola Peltz: a style profile

Nicola Peltz is an American actor whose name now appears as often in fashion pages as in film credits. This profile sets out what reputable sources record about her career and her style, without photographs and without quotes that cannot be traced to a published source.

Background

According to Wikipedia, Nicola Anne Peltz was born on 9 January 1995 in Westchester County, New York. She is the daughter of the businessman Nelson Peltz and the model Claudia Heffner, and grew up in a large family: she has six brothers, including the actor Will Peltz, a sister, and two half-siblings from her father’s earlier marriages.

On screen

Her screen career started young and moved quickly into big productions:

Big-studio roles brought red carpets with them, and with red carpets came the fashion coverage that has since become a large part of her public profile.

On the runway

Peltz’s most notable moment as a model came in October 2015, when, as Wikipedia records, she walked in Alexander Wang’s final show for Balenciaga at Paris Fashion Week. For an actor rather than a professional model, being cast in a farewell collection for a major house was a clear signal of how the fashion industry saw her.

The Valentino connection

If one label is tied to her name, it is Valentino. Grazia notes that she wore a hot-pink Valentino gown with elbow-length opera gloves to the Met Gala and sat in the front row of a Valentino show in October 2021, months before her wedding.

The wedding gown

Peltz married Brooklyn Beckham on 9 April 2022 in Palm Beach, Florida, in a Jewish ceremony; the engagement had been announced on 11 July 2020. Her gown was Valentino Haute Couture, created with Pierpaolo Piccioli, the house’s creative director at the time of the wedding. Grazia reported that the couple visited the Rome atelier twice, and Marie Claire, citing British Vogue, said the dress followed roughly a year of meetings and travel.

The press accounts agree on the essentials of the design:

• a sleeveless, fitted silhouette with an understated, 1990s feel;
• a dramatic, very long train;
• a floor-length veil and matching elbow-length lace gloves, a callback to her opera-glove Met Gala look;
• embroidery that was planned and then dropped, in favour of simplicity.

Marie Claire describes a hidden “something blue”: an evil-eye motif and a message from her mother embroidered in blue inside the skirt, invisible in the published photographs. The same report notes that she had a personalised label sewn into Brooklyn Beckham’s suit, which, according to Grazia, was Dior menswear designed by Kim Jones.

A gown planned with embroidery and then stripped back — a very nineties idea of what makes a dress modern.

What defines the look

Reading across the sources, a few consistent threads emerge. She returns to the same house rather than switching labels for every appearance. She favours dramatic proportion, such as long trains and opera-length gloves, against otherwise clean lines. And her best-documented outfit, the wedding dress, deliberately chose restraint over ornament, which links it, perhaps unexpectedly, to the minimalist slip dresses of the decade she was born in.

Like any style profile, this is an outline rather than a full wardrobe history. The sources below give fuller detail and, in the case of the fashion press, the photographs that this site does not reproduce.