Nicola and Brooklyn: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told (and told, and told, and told again)
– 4 min read
I’ve read about threesomes but I don’t think I’ve read a threesome until yesterday. In a new joint profile, Glamour Germany got into bed with Nicola and Brooklyn Peltz-Beckham and didn’t come up for air until they established that they are the most authentic, the buzziest, the most important couple to exist since Antony and Cleopatra.
Now I’m not looking to knock a writer because I recognize it’s an honour and privilege to be able to snark on the internet when the prevailing editorial mandate of most publications is to not piss off their corporate overlords. It feels like every publication is on the brink of extinction and that means we get a lot of celebrity-controlled softball interviews.
The title is for this is, “For Nicola and Brooklyn Peltz Beckham, Love Conquers All”. What, exactly, have the Peltz-Beckhams conquered? A bad case of jet lag?
The subhead calls Nicola and Brooklyn the world’s most talked-about couple. If “the world” is the Notes app in my phone, maybe. But even that’s a stretch. But we all know the “nobody cares about these two” is untrue. I’ve written about them several times, clearly I care. PEOPLE has given them several top stories over the last two weeks, those clicks are coming from somewhere.
What’s interesting about Brooklyn and Nicola’s dynamic is that you really see them sweat. It’s the opposite of effortless and enigmatic: they want approval so badly and there’s a growing sense that they are frustrated that they have to work so hard to get it. They both wildly underestimate how savvy a lot of gossips are about planted stories; we can accept privilege but we don’t accept reputation manipulation. If money was enough to make people like you, Elon Musk would be as popular as Dolly Parton. (Even writing their name in the same sentence feels wrong.)
This is them trying to switch it up: the energy is tilted away from drama and focused on how super amazing in love they are, which is fine. It’s full of platitudes and effusive praise for mundane things (showing up on time, wearing heels, agreeing to a manicure, finishing the photo shoot). There’s not a lot to write about because under this whipped cream, there’s no pie. Absolutely nothing to bite into.
They might open a restaurant and Nicola might act or direct again and Brooklyn might be in her film but the main focus of the story is their wedding. The wedding. The wedding. The wedding!
They got married three years ago and fine, maybe they are still in honeymoon phase. But their wedding was heavily covered in Vogue at the time. You can’t get better than that. Then there was the tabloid coverage, which has recently picked back up despite the story being years old.
This is clearly an attempt to control the narrative. They want to emphasize how intimate and special and amazing the wedding was and it was just about THEM and their favourite part of the wedding was their private moments. The subtext is: see, it’s not us that’s the problem, it’s Victoria!
In the midst of this triteness, there’s one thing I will give them credit for and it is that they talk about a Covid wedding and mention that they didn’t want to put their grandparents at risk, which led to delays. That’s a great reason to delay a wedding. He mentions family in passing once or twice but she talks about hers like they are love oracles and not tacky billionaires. “My parents always said, ‘When you meet the right person, you’ll just know.’”
A crack PR team and reputation management firm and this is the best line you could come up with? ChatGPT is more profound. If I opened a fortune cookie and read that I’d think, “wow, low effort.”
Then there’s the meet-cute story that is wedged into the interview. First Coachella, then a party, then a club date. What Nicola and Brooklyn are trying to convey here is that they are independently popular. That’s why they go out of their way to mention that they connected at Leonard DiCaprio’s Halloween party where, get this, Brooklyn was hiding from the paps in a bush. Read that again. They want us to believe that at the most A-list of parties he needed to hide. Because they are so famous, you see.
Even with a lot of control and very generous writing, they can’t spin personality. The more resources they expend on their love story and wedding, the less people seem to believe it.
So how can they beat the boring nepo babies reputation? What would a win look like? Over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed the comments on their Instagram have shifted. They have a lot of defenders. The positivity doesn’t at all align with what I see about them in my inbox at our Substack, The Squawk. It’s subtle but noticeable; it’s not that there are negative comments about David or Victoria (which would be very obvious), it’s that there are a lot of positive comments about Brooklyn and Nicola. When a negative comment pops up, the defense is swift. The Glamour Germany account has some negative comments but Nicola’s has a lot of positive comments for the same story. Maybe this is confirmation bias or the result of different audiences and followers. But social media skews negative, which makes the tone and praise coming out of the comment section … ahem… a bit strange.
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