Why a Hilton hotel heiress has partnered with an Australian fashion designer
Friends turned collaborators Nicky Hilton Rothschild and Rebecca Vallance-Gasan have more in common than just fashion.
There was time in the early 2000s when the Hilton sisters were everywhere that was anywhere.
The teenage hotel heiresses, the new American “It” girls, literally broke out of great-grandfather Conrad Hilton’s landmark Waldorf Astoria, to set New York City night-life on fire.
As the paparazzi swooned and the reality TV era dawned, Paris Hilton’s fame went stratospheric following her starring role in The Simple Life, alongside fellow nepo baby Nicole Richie, while younger sister Nicky chose the quieter life, attending fashion school, designing her own brand and later marrying into another storeyed dynasty – that of British financier James Rothschild.
Talking from New York, Nicky Hilton Rothschild – named after her grand-uncle, Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr, the first husband of Elizabeth Taylor (the marriage was famously short lived) – is back on the fashion circuit. She is holding court with Australian designer Rebecca Vallance-Gasan within her old stomping ground, the Waldorf Astoria hotel, which is nearing the end of a $US1 billion facelift.
A week earlier, the friends charged the Cannes Film Festival’s red carpet in custom Rebecca Vallance gowns and Chopard jewels; not just as BFFs, but as collaborators ahead of their Nicky Hilton x Rebecca Vallance Holiday 2024 collection, which dropped globally on October 1.
“We met a few years ago,” smiles Rothschild, polishing off a bottle of water in one of the hotel’s suites after WISH’s cover shoot. “I was pregnant and I had spotted one of Rebecca’s dresses on a friend of mine. I loved it, and I started trying to track it down and it was sold out everywhere, so I DMed Rebecca and the friendship blossomed from there.”
The pair kept in touch as Vallance-Gasan’s business continued to expand in America. “We went out for drinks last September,” continues the 40-year-old Rothschild, who studied design at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, “and having such a similar style aesthetic, we came up with the idea of combining forces to create the ultimate party dress collection.”
“Holiday was right for this,” agrees Vallance-Gasan, 43, who is currently averaging half a dozen trips to the US each year. The Ballarat-born founder has grand plans for the international retail rollout of RV (as she calls the brand), starting in London in 2026, followed by NYC, Miami, Dallas and Los Angeles. The label currently has nine stores in Australia, with Canberra, Pacific Fair on the Gold Coast and Melbourne’s Chadstone slated to bring that number to 12 by 2025.
“Sixty per cent of rebeccavallance.com weekly sales are international,” continues Vallance-Gasan, “so I’m sure we’ll see that spike with this collaboration.”
“Sparkles, glitter, elegance,” smiles Rothschild, of the cocktail collection that builds on the success of Vallance’s now-signature bow minidress that has been worn by Nicky, Paris and even their mum Kathy Hilton, in various iterations. In fact, Paris was the first to wear RV back in 2021, with Vallance-Gasan’s feminine designs also sported by the likes of Selena Gomez, Rita Ora, Zara Tindall and Geri Halliwell.
“Nicky has been involved in every meeting, every call, every decision,” Vallance-Gasan adds. “It’s different to … you know how some people just stick their name on stuff and go along with it.”
Wish Magazine’s design issue is out Friday October 4. Inside your copy of The Australian.
Prior to the Cannes Film Festival, the friends were in London shooting the collection’s look book at another destination hotel, Claridge’s.
“You would think the highlight would be the glamorous red carpet, but for me it was just the fun of hanging out, getting ready,” says Rothschild of their Cannes rendezvous. “We’ve got a similar sense of humour,” adds Vallance-Gasan. “We love to laugh. It was those moments between the big moments that were really special. Just making memories. We worked really hard, but we laughed a lot.”
Gracing the red carpet may be second nature to Rothschild, but for Vallance-Gasan, stepping out on The Croisette in Cannes was somewhat next level. “I did weights like crazy in the months leading up because I didn’t know what to expect,” she laughs.
“I knew it was a 360-degree view!”
However, it was Rothschild’s pre-glam Omni Hiraya sculpting tool with which Vallance-Gasan was particularly enamoured. “Travelling, I feel like [the tool] sculpts and drains me,” Rothschild chimes in, before confessing to a “very Y2K” event-prep playlist of Britney and Black Eyed Peas.
But it’s not just ’90s hits and a penchant for a skinny margarita that the pair has in common. Their introduction to the fashion industry via modelling is another similarity.
“My mother was very, very against all of that,” shares Rothschild, “but occasionally she did have friends that were fashion designers, and we would walk in their shows,” she adds of New York designer Dennis Basso.
“My parents also,” agrees Vallance-Gasan, noting it was a classmate who originally entered her into a Girlfriend magazine competition.
“But I loved fashion, dressing up. I was very much a girl’s girl,” continues Rothschild. “I always, always wanted to do something in fashion. It was never a question in my mind.”
At 16 and 19 respectively, Rothschild and sister Paris made international headlines with their Vanity Fair debut in controversial photographer David LaChapelle’s Hip-Hop Debs shoot, which launched the fourth generation of Hiltons into the history books by “setting society on its ear”, as the magazine declared.
“The behind-the-scenes story of that shoot is quite funny,” smiles Rothschild. “I was in high school, living where we are right now,” she says of Waldorf Towers’ apartment 30H, of course.
“Paris calls me – and she’s very close to David – and she’s like, ‘Do you want to do this photo shoot for Vanity Fair? They’re going to fly you first class to LA, and they’re going to shoot for the weekend’.
“My parents were out of town, so I’m like, ‘Yes!’. So, I flew to LA for the shoot. And during the shoot, my mom’s best friend Faye [Resnick] is driving by, and sees us shooting that shot in front of the motel …
“She calls my mom, and she’s like, ‘I think I see Paris and Nicky in front of a motel doing a photo shoot’. Mom goes, ‘No, no, no, no, they’re in New York’. So we were busted very fast.
“I love David, I think he’s a genius. And the photos, while some are quite risqué, I think they’re iconic. We were also doing a shot at the Saddle Ranch in LA and they realised that I was underage, so they kicked me out and shut the shoot down because I was not 21.”
Not even close. And while Rothschild’s mum Kathy (a former child actor who married real estate mogul Richard “Rick” Hilton at 20 and is the half sister of Kyle and Kim Richards) remains queen bee on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills franchise, even during seasons when she’s not a regular cast member, her younger daughter has never been tempted by reality television. “I’ve always been more behind the camera,” Rothschild emphasises. Ditto for Vallance-Gasan, who shunned any interest in The Real Housewives of Sydney, despite being pursued.
“We’re private people,” Vallance-Gasan says. “We love our families. We’re obsessed with our kids and husbands. We have good energy for what the job brings, but we’re quite private people.”
As it also turns out, both Rothschild and Vallance-Gasan married someone from a different country and enticed them back to their respective homelands.
Vallance-Gasan met Maltese financier David Gasan in Sydney while he was on holiday during the Olympics. After initially moving to Malta and then London (where she founded RV, originally as a resort offering) the pair married in Melbourne and later settled in Sydney where they had their sons Matthias, now 9, and Rafael, 7.
“I think we’re similar with our family values,” continues Vallance-Gasan. Case in point: “My father-in-law came to see us at Claridge’s. It was so lovely shooting the campaign in the city because that’s where the brand started 14 years ago,” she adds with some nostalgia. “Shooting at Claridge’s was also important to Nicky because her wedding was based there. But we spend a huge amount of time abroad as well – so, I think, global families.”
Rothschild married London-born and raised James Rothschild, 39, in 2015 at The Orangery at Kensington Palace. He is the grandson of Victor Rothschild, the 3rd Baron Rothschild, and his mother, Anita Patience Guinness, hails from the brewing dynasty. They now have three children, Lily-Grace, 8, Teddy, 6 and Chasen, 2.
“We get back to London quite a bit,” says Rothschild. “We spend time in both places because we’re both very close with our families.
Claridge’s was the perfect backdrop,” she adds of the campaign shoot. “We shot all over the hotel, on the stairway and entry, the bars, the ballrooms. I grew up going there, and it’s one of my favourite hotels in the world.”
That said, New York City will always be her home: “I am a born-and-bred New Yorker. I’m very, very loyal to my city,” she smiles. “I lived in LA for a bit, but my roots are in New York.
“I grew up here at the Waldorf, and I always told myself, ‘When I’m grown up, I’m going to live downtown’. So certainly enough, I moved right downtown to the West Village, and now I live with my family in NoHo.
“But it’s just so amazing to be back here,” she adds of the Art Deco Park Avenue palace that is the Waldorf Astoria. “It’s going to be the most beautiful hotel in New York City. It’s such an important part of my family’s history. My great-grandfather literally manifested owning the Waldorf. In his desk under the glass, he had a picture of the Waldorf Astoria, and it said, ‘The greatest of them all’. He said, ‘I will buy that one day, I will own that’. And he did.”
“That’s manifesting!” laughs Vallance-Gasan. “I’m going to do that tonight.”
“It was so much fun living there because it was constant events,” continues Rothschild. “Paris and I were the little Eloises of the Waldorf. We would crash the ballrooms, go see what events and parties were going on. It would not be strange to go down in the elevator with Mick Jagger, President Clinton, every president was in and out of that hotel. When the president was there, I was always late for school because it would take, with security, one hour to get out and then one hour to get back in.
“I’m very proud,” she adds of her heritage. “My great-grandfather created one of the leading hotel chains of the world. He was a pioneer. The Hilton brand is up there with Apple, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Disney.
“We would crash the ballrooms, go see what events and parties were going on. It would not be strange to go down in the elevator with Mick Jagger, President Clinton, every president was in and out of that hotel.”
“He was an incredible entrepreneur. And I think me and my siblings are definitely inspired by him, and have learned a lot. He was a beautiful man inside and out, and left nearly all of his fortune to the Conrad Hilton Foundation, which donates to non-profits that alleviate human suffering. It’s been around since 1944 and given away nearly $US3 billion in grants to non-profits. Amazing fostering youth organisations, early childhood development, homelessness, the Catholic Sisters Program, and so on.”
Despite the “hotel heiress” moniker she’s worn for much of her life, Rothschild was raised to leave her own footprint.
“We definitely had that instilled in us at a very young age that, ‘You are going to work and make a name for yourself’,” she says.
Her sister Paris Hilton for example, is not just an entrepreneur for the ages, with an estimated personal fortune of $US300 million, spanning music to fragrance. She also recently became a vocal proponent for troubled teens, speaking publicly about her own abuse and advocating for victims and for lawmaking policy. In 2020, she released a frank documentary, This is Paris, on YouTube about her life, in which she talked openly about the trauma she suffered at a reformatory school in Utah, where she was sent as a 16-year-old.
“It’s incredible the change she has made and shone this light on the troubled-teen industry,” says Rothschild. “She’s done an incredible job. I know my sister was capable of many things, but never did I think she would be changing laws. I’m extremely proud of her, she has taken that pain and really turned it into purpose.”
The multibillion-dollar troubled-teen industry currently operates without meaningful oversight. Paris Hilton remains dedicated to urging US lawmakers to pass a bill called the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act. “My mom and I attended one of the Congress hearings in DC with her last year and that was really nice to be there and support her.”
Paris Hilton herself now has two children under two, while Rothschild’s daughters are also very close – just like her and Paris.
“My eldest, she’s very serious, very much a rule follower,” she says. “And then my youngest is a little more silly, fun and spunky. They’re very, very different. But they’re incredible girls and I’m very proud of them.”
Vallance-Gasan’s two boys are similarly close in age and share an equally special bond. “We talk about being mothers all the time,” she smiles in reference to the exhausting subject of balancing motherhood with the demands of a global brand.
“I think it’s about being present, no matter what you’re doing. If you are at home and it’s time to do the readers at night after dinner, be present. And if you’re here on a job … making sure I get that FaceTime in when they wake up, and when they’re on the way to school. The time difference in Australia is great, because I know when I’m here and I’m working, my kids are asleep, so it’s fine. It’s just about being present, no matter where I am.”
Rothschild will join Vallance-Gasan in Sydney next month to celebrate their collection locally. The last time she visited Australia, she stayed at the Versace Hotel on the Gold Coast while Paris was filming House of Wax. “I’m bringing my husband this time,” Rothschild smiles. “He’s never been.”
As for Vallance-Gasan – who, despite jet-set appearances, is happiest at home in Sydney’s east in the Qantas PJs she designed for the airline last year – there is no plan to slow down.
“Over the past two years, the business has seen 128 per cent growth and we have the objective to reach 20 retail stores in the next few years, both within Australia and internationally,” she shares.
RV’s international wholesale sales are up 177 per cent year-on-year, from FY22 to FY24, and this new Holiday 2024 collection will be available at Mytheresa, Saks, Revolve and Harrods.
“I’ve got 110 people who work at Rebecca Vallance, I’ve got a young family and a husband and an international business. I don’t have time to sit back and think, ‘What am I going to do to chill out?’. I don’t have the luxury, to be honest.
“But I would like to have a massage, maybe, at some point. That might be nice. A lymphatic one,” she laughs, not missing a beat.
This story is from the October issue of WISH. Find your copy inside The Australian this Friday October 4.
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