Displaced dogs
The political economy of images and the awkwardness of weddings
“I’m the eldest boy” Kendall Roy, Succession
“Back then, I didn't know why
Why you were misunderstood
So now, I see through your eyes
All that you did was love”
Lyrics to Mama, Spice Girls, 1996
“.. today is the day I get to marry you, my forever babe, my love and my best friend, Nicola…”
Brooklyn Peltz Beckham wedding vows and tattoo, 2022
The year is 1999. A couple throw a lavish £750,000 wedding with exclusive rights to Ok! Magazine. The wedding at an Irish castle includes an outfit change from champagne-coloured Vera Wang into an Antonio Baradi purple dress and suit, two upholstered thrones, and two outfits for their four month old baby. The bride in her pixie cut is smiling ear to ear with sheer joy.
Twenty three years later there is another wedding in the public eye, Vogue are there to capture the event, the bill is in the millions. The baby in the purple cowboy hat is now the groom.
Some time passes and pictures are released of a vow renewal and the groom’s parents aren’t there. The young couple never seem to be in the same space at the same time as the groom’s family. What’s going on?
Monday 19th January 2026 Brooklyn Peltz Beckham told the world in a 700 word statement. The oldest son of Spice Girl and fashion designer Victoria Beckham and footballer David Beckham, said he does not want to reconcile with his parents, and in so doing made it clear they are estranged.
What unfolded over the next few days was a mind boggling amount of coverage. The Daily Mail had a feed of live updates on their website. All my favourite culture-focussed podcasts were discussing it. And social media was in a frenzy.
The 2022 wedding of Brooklyn Peltz Beckham, then 23, and Nicola Peltz Beckham, then 28, had been the merger of British wealth with American mega-wealth. Pop and sport celebrity merging with Billionaire big business. Nicola’s father Nelson Peltz started out in wholesaling and now has 8 billion assets under management. In 2003 he tried to buy New York Magazine with villain buddies Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. He lives near Mar’a’largo, voted for Trump in 2016 and then fundraised for his campaign and supported him again in 2024. He claims to have introduced Donald Trump to Elon Musk.
Family dynamics are intriguing. And in many ways even before the statement it felt like we were following a reality tv family (Keeping Up with the Beckhams - starring the couple and their four children) with the storylines refracted through Victoria and David’s Netflix documentaries, Victoria’s hilarious YouTube content and social media. On Victoria’s Instagram we frequently see David tending to his beehives, Cruz playing guitar at home, the family celebrating life’s milestones by cooking and dancing around their kitchen island.
But there are interesting questions here. Did that baby consent to a life within an economy of images? Does he have the acumen to navigate the mega wealth which is now part of his life or to negotiate the social contract of sharing his life in return for his privilege? Is there an exit strategy for babies born in the public eye which doesn’t involve going no contact with their families and burning their lives to the ground - and if so what is it?
Before Nicola Peltz Beckham and Brooklyn Peltz Beckham got married they had four engagement parties. This was apparently because the Beckham elders were wary about their liberal friends being at the same event as Trump and his cronies. The Beckhams’ ongoing success relies on the image they portray, unlike the Peltz’s money which is busy exponentially reproducing itself all the time. David in 2022 was still waiting for his Knighthood, which was finally bestowed in 2025.
Having multiple engagement events to keep people apart is possible when you are very rich, but typically people only have one big wedding.
I’m guessing it takes quite a lot of time and quite a lot of lawyers to prepare and coordinate 500+ NDAs for wedding guests, performers and vendors. And that a whole team of lawyers are needed to prepare a pre nup. And that these processes are potentially fraught? In the run up to the wedding is when the question of Brooklyn’s rights to the trademark ‘Brooklyn Beckham’ came up. As the Shameless podcast reported, a separate deal was happening at that time involving the Beckhams monetising all their trademarks - Victoria had trademarked all of her children’s names as is common practice amongst celebrities and so Brooklyn didn’t have a legal right to intervene in the deal. Is there a world in which the Peltz lawyers were realising for the first time that this was an asset that Brooklyn didn’t himself own and couldn’t bring into the marriage?
The rights to make money through the name ‘Beckham’ understandably sits with Victoria and David. They have proved themselves to be skilled at this over the last 25+ years, creating a privileged life for them and their children and wider families, and the freedom to do things like establish a fashion business or buy a football club. They wouldn’t want a billionaire family who don’t ultimately care about their brand to stick their name on Ketchup bottles or cereal packets, diminish its value, and then run off into the sunset like Daisy and Tom in The Great Gatsby after they kill Tom’s working-class mistress.
I won’t dwell too long on what Brooklyn was bringing into the marriage. He seems like a nice person, but someone who at 26, so certainly at 23, doesn’t really know himself. In his late teens he launched himself as a photographer with objectively humiliating results. And for the last few years has called himself a chef. The kind of videos he makes online, making pasta or sandwiches, sometimes collaborating with Vogue, cost a lot of money to produce and it’s unlikely they make much profit. But what I will say is that it’s refreshing in the whole of human history to see a man with no means of making money passed from his wealthy birth family to his wealthier marital family like some sort of strategic alliance between a foreign royal family and a Tudor monarch.
More interesting perhaps in this bigger question of the production of images, is the film career of Nicola Peltz Beckham. She has a few small credits in big films but has moved into financing films that she stars in. The film Lola, which she wrote, directed and starred in, was scathingly reviewed in the Guardian. It focuses on a family in extreme poverty and crisis in a way that, the review says, only exploits real life experiences like this for the gain of its extremely wealthy star and financier. The characters are not given humanity, but instead a clear - right wing - moral framework dictates their outcomes. There is a young genderqueer child who is killed. And the titular character Lola’s life is turned around by motherhood as the result of rape. The Beckhams did come to the premier to support their daughter in law but they managed not to be photographed with an arm around Elon Musk.
Why does Nicola need a career? She could just stay at home with her four dogs (more on them later) and have Brooklyn make her pasta using water from the sea. But she - and by extension they - seem compelled to be in the public eye. If you are a film star these days you can’t avoid making online content with media brands. It was one of these videos that gave me some more insights into the Peltz Beckhams as a couple. They were extremely awkward with each other and completely lacking in charm. In a world where charm and connection with audience are assets that generate income, it’s unfortunate if you are placed in the spotlight before you are old enough to consent, only for it to reveal that you are lacking.
Which is not to say that the Beckham elders have always been popular. I can’t really get into the backlash against David for missing goals or what-have-you but they are in the Netflix doc. There has been speculation over the years that David strayed and used NDAs to mostly keep out of the headlines. But if this is the case and they decided to stay together anyway, the impacts are only on themselves and perhaps one or two other consenting adults. For the most part though, the Beckhams come across as campy and silly and to have chemistry with each other. The same could be said of the Spice Girls, who may have been dismissed in the 90s by some, but over the years have become a British institution.
Which brings us to the Peltz Beckham wedding. First Brooklyn says Victoria pulled out of making Nicola’s dress, but it soon became clear this would have been her reception dress not main dress, which was hard to be too sympathetic about. There was also to-do about who sat at the top table, which seemed fairly standard.
The bigger accusation was that cheeky so-and-so, Democrat supporter and second most famous of J-Lo’s husbands Marc Anthony caused a scene by asking the most beautiful woman at Nicola Peltz Beckham’s wedding “… Victoria Beckham!” To come to the stage, causing Nicola to cry. Furthermore, so says Brooklyn in his statement, they then had an impromptu mother-and-son dance in the moment when bride and groom should have had their first dance. And to make it worse, Victoria danced inappropriately with her son.
We have all been to weddings, and something tense or awkward or weird often happens. Perhaps Brooklyn is too young to understand that. Perhaps his family-in-law made a really big deal about this incident and he wasn’t allowed to forget it until they held their Beckham-family-free vow renewal? Whatever the case, the result of bringing this up in the statement has been an unending stream of joyful comedy clips and AI on social media recreating Victoria’s dances. Even Dane Bowers who collaborated on the song You’re Out of Your Mind with Victoria post-Spice Girls posted their weird choreography saying he would have paid to see her do that dance at the wedding. And her solo song Not Such An Innocent girl topped the iTunes Charts. Would this have happened if Victoria didn’t have a lot of goodwill and a campy online presence already? I think not. Taking yourself very seriously online is a risky approach, as Brooklyn may be finding out now.
One of the other accusations that Brooklyn levelled at Victoria was that she didn’t help Nicola advocate on behalf of displaced dogs in the LA wildfires. Presumably he wanted Victoria to repost a link to a go fund me or similar, ignoring the fact that she never uses her platform for charitable causes relating to displaced humans. This set off alarm bells for me as although animal charities are important, people like Bridget Bardot hid insidious racism behind care for animals. In the video of the Peltz Beckhams I watched they talked a lot about dogs in a way that they may have thought was relatable, but suggested they struggle to make connections with people.
Brooklyn says going no contact has reduced his anxiety, and I hope that’s true. The family he has joined seem far more problematic (politically) and controlling (through litigation) than the one he has left behind. Not to mention that Nicola apparently alienated other boyfriends from their families whilst they were dating, including the younger brother of Gigi and Bella Hadid, and rumours have swirled that she pushed a nanny down the stairs.
But one of the questions that only Brooklyn can answer is whether it is truely unforgivable that he was folded into an economy of images from birth. His parents seemed to steward these images carefully to make the money that gave him and his siblings a hugely privileged life. But he still didn’t choose it.
If it is unforgivable, why is it that he is embarking on a similar project with his wife? Will he have enough power in his new dynamic to make sure his new brand is always on the right side of history? Only time will tell, and our eyes will be glued to the situation throughout.
Bravo!