Nicholai Hilton Rothschild, always known as Nicky — fashion designer, younger sister of the more (in)famous Paris and wife of the British banker James Rothschild, a dazzling union of new world/old world dynasties (the Hilton brand is estimated to be worth £11 billion; the Rothschilds’ more diluted dynastic fortune is thought to reach higher into the tens of billions) — is musing on the greatest Sliding Doors moment of her life.
It was the early Noughties. She and Paris, great-granddaughters of the hotel mogul Conrad Hilton, were teenage It girls, living together in the Hollywood Hills, dancing on tables and appearing on every red carpet.
Noting this, Fox television producers asked them to star in a reality show — then an unknown format. It would be called The Simple Life and the concept, as the theme song went, was, “Let’s take two girls, both filthy rich, from the bright lights into the sticks.”
Paris was keen. Nicky, not yet 20, was not. In her autobiography, Paris Hilton: The Memoir, Paris recalls her sister’s objection was, “I don’t want to be funny. I want to be classy.”
With her sister, Paris, at the 2001 VH1 Vogue Fashion Awards in New Yorkgetty images
“I’m very surprised that at such a young age I was wise not to relinquish all my privacy,” Nicky says when we meet in a suite at the Newman hotel in Fitzrovia, central London. “You have the networks waving a big cheque at you, saying, ‘You’re going to become really famous.’ [But] I am more private [than Paris], so the idea of them sending us to a farm and filming everything just did not align.”
Did Paris, two years her senior, try to talk her into it? “She did.” Yet Nicky wouldn’t back down. The gig went to Lionel Richie’s daughter Nicole.
The sisters remained “best friends” but went their separate ways. Nicky, now 42, fulfilled her mother’s dreams of becoming a Park Avenue princess, making the perfect marriage to Rothschild, 40, the son of Amschel Rothschild, who took his own life in 1996, and Anita Guinness. (His sisters, Kate and Alice, had previously been married to Ben and Zac Goldsmith respectively.) Nicky has raised their three children in a NoHo loft (north of SoHo, Manhattan) while working on various fashion collaborations and the philanthropic Hilton Foundation.
How Paris became ‘the first influencer’
Meanwhile, Paris became one of the best-known people in the world, “the first influencer” as she’s put it, famous for being famous long before Instagram existed. She made millions she didn’t need from her skincare, clothing and perfume lines, along with her career as a DJ. At the same time, her life became a circus of paparazzi chases and hysterical fans, of exes releasing sex tapes of her as a teenager onto the internet and relentless mockery of her apparent vapidity.
The 2020 documentary This Is Paris showed her constantly jetting alone around the world, battling insomnia, refusing to take a holiday until she’d made $1 billion, while a worried Nicky berated her for her lateness and being “greedy —you won’t turn down a cheque”, she sighs.
The Hilton family: Rick, Kathy, Nicky and Parisgetty images
But then a heartbreaking backstory was revealed. When Paris was a wild, nightclubbing 16-year-old, her strict parents, Richard and Kathy, sent her to a Californian boarding school that promised to fix broken children. They were well meaning, unaware the “tough love” promised included intimate body searches, showering in front of jeering male and female guards, days spent hauling rocks up mountains and no talking to other “students”, except during all-night sessions when the children were forced to torment each other verbally for hours.
Meanwhile, Nicky, oblivious, was at home living a privileged, loved teenager’s life. No wonder, Paris admitted, “I was never jealous of my sister, but I was envious.” Making the documentary was the first time the family learnt about Paris’s teenage travails. How did Nicky feel? “Definitely emotional,” she says, clearly unwilling to discuss further.
She’s more outspoken about the misogyny surrounding Noughties starlets like Paris, Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson. “It is outrageous how those women were vilified and bullied,” Nicky says. “It was so irresponsible — sadistic, so mean-spirited. These are young women who are just going out and having fun. Too much fun sometimes, but not harming anyone. I’d like to hope that wouldn’t happen today. I think with all these social justice movements we’ve started to wake up, to realise that type of treatment is not tolerated any more. But although it’s improved a lot, I don’t know if it will ever fully be over.”
‘I have very good radar. My sister? Not so much’
Nicky is worked up in the way only a little sister can be. This says a lot about her loyalty to Paris, because her default vibe is serene. Dressed down for our interview in a grey cashmere turtleneck, black trousers and Adidas trainers, she’s startlingly similar to Paris in appearance. But while her sister is famous for her baby voice and hyper manner, Nicky is calm and considered, with the slow, arch drawl affected by the Manhattan socialites Tom Wolfe dubbed “social x-rays”. Yet in manner, she’s warm and unaffected — fumbling in her handbag for some under-eye patches, offering me a pack, then sticking the black patches from another beneath her eyes, talking all the while.
At the Newman hotel. Dress, junie.com. Shoes, carolinaherrera.comDan Kennedy for The Times Magazine
As heiresses, the Hiltons were always prey to fortune hunters. “I have very good radar,” Nicky says. “I’m pretty perceptive, scoping out who’s good and not so good. I know how to keep those people away. My sister? Not so much. Her friends like to joke I’m the gatekeeper. That’s my nickname.”
After a string of boyfriends, Paris has now been married for five years to the businessman Carter Reum. The couple have a son, three, and a daughter, two, and live in Los Angeles. The families got together at Christmas. Nicky pulls out her phone to show me pictures of the cousins in velvet dresses and mini tuxedos under a vast Christmas tree. Then there’s a completely on-brand shot of a pink pram containing Paris’s pet ferret, alongside two small white fluffy dogs. “Paris thinks ferrets are cute. I don’t. They smell. Now my littlest is like, ‘I want a ferret.’ Not happening.”
Today, Paris is campaigning to protect children from the “troubled teen” industry, overseeing the passing of two federal bills. “I’m so proud of her,” Nicky says. “Who would have thought that she would be passing laws in Congress, really taking that pain and turning it into purpose?”
A New Yorker in Notting Hill
After a decade in New York, since January the Hilton Rothschilds have lived in Notting Hill in west London. Their daughters, Theodora, nine, and Lily-Grace, eight, are being home schooled in line with the US curriculum, while their three-year-old son, Chasen, is in nursery school.
“I’ve been coming to London since I was a little girl but always stayed in Mayfair. Now I feel like I’ve fallen in love with London all over again. Notting Hill is just so charming. I’ve found all my little places — my butcher, Lidgate; my coffee place. I love walking along Portobello Road to buy bread. It’s always bustling. I love New York to the core, but I’m really having a great time here.”
Nicky and her husband, James Rothschild, in 2020getty images
Even better: Nicky’s American pals have begun pitching up. She’s been hanging out with a childhood friend from LA, “Then I bumped into one of my old friends from New York at [Notting Hill restaurant] Granger & Co. He’s living here.”
Are they all fleeing Donald Trump? He was an old family friend (although three years ago Paris said, “Not any more,” when somebody said this, confessing on a separate occasion she’d lied about voting for Trump in 2016 and in fact hadn’t voted at all). Ever discreet, Nicky doesn’t mention the man her sister described as “friendly, warm, orange”. “It’s a combination of things,” she says. “There was a bit of an exodus from California after the fires, tax things, Mamdani [Zohran Mamdani, New York’s left-wing mayor]… Just everything.”
Their move is probably temporary (“But who knows?”), motivated partly by James’s work for his investment firm, Tru Arrow Partners, but also to be closer to his mother, who breeds horses in Hampshire. It also works perfectly for Nicky, whose two main brand partnerships are based here — the first her jewellery range, Theo Grace, named after her two daughters, offering (surprisingly affordable) jewellery that can be personalised with engravings or photos of loved ones. She’s wearing a ring from the line displaying a picture of her papillon dog, Minnie (there’s also a cat called Mac — “I don’t trust people who don’t like animals”).
The second is La Coqueta, an upmarket childrenswear brand, with boutiques in the likes of Notting Hill, Charleston and Palm Beach in the US, selling cute pastel rompers and dresses, designed for families who don’t have to worry about laundry.
Dress, safiyaa.com. Necklace, vickisarge.com. Shoes, jimmychoo.com. Sunglasses, longchamp.comDAN KENNEDY for the times magazine
Nicky has designed a charming range of 21 items for the brand, some with sashes and big skirts — homages to the matchy-matchy outfits in which Kathy Hilton liked to dress her daughters. “But these are so beautifully made and wearable. I remember my mum dressing us up in these big, puffy, itchy dresses, and we couldn’t wait to take them off,” Nicky says. Then there are two matching adult and mini-me dresses — one in a pink and white toile de jouy print featuring drawings of key milestones in her gilded life.
These include the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan, the Hilton’s flagship property. When Nicky was 12, the family (there are two younger brothers, Barron, now 36, and Conrad, 32) moved here from Bel Air to live in a 2,500sq ft condo, 30H, with marble floors and views across the city. Michael Jackson and his children were in 30A; Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand were also in the building.
“Living in the Waldorf was fun, definitely glamorous. You could go up in the elevator one day with the president; the next, with the Rolling Stones. Paris and I would sneak into the ballroom to hide under the tables and see who we could glimpse, or if there were any leftover gift bags in the closet.”
They didn’t use room service, but maids came in. “Clean sheets daily. Quite the luxury. My school friends loved going to the executive lounge. At 5pm every day they put out a spread of everything and we could help ourselves.”
First brush with fame — and scandal
Another image shows the Convent of the Sacred Heart on the Upper East Side of New York, the Catholic girls’ school attended by Nicky (and Lady Gaga). And Paris? Nicky snorts. “The headmistress and Paris decided very fast the all-girl thing was not for her.” Nicky loved school but, after Paris organised fake IDs for them both, from 14 she was also a regular at Manhattan’s nightclubs. When she was 16, she and Paris flew secretly to LA for a Vanity Fair photoshoot with David LaChapelle.
Modelling her La Coqueta range with her childrencourtesy of la coqueta
“We lied to my parents. We told them we were going to a sleepover. We knew they’d find out but we’d worry about that later. This was too good an opportunity to turn down.” They were shot standing on Hollywood Boulevard in heels and couture microskirts. A friend of Kathy’s spotted them. “Mum went ballistic. Looking back, a teenager flying across the country is pretty wild. That would not happen today. But no harm was done and it definitely put us on the map.”
The magazine billed them as “hip-hop debs” and the sisters became A-listers. They moved to the Hollywood Hills. Invitations included Sex and the City’s producers asking them to play rowdy neighbours in the episode where Samantha moves to the Meatpacking District. “But we didn’t make the flight and we were so nervous and scared we didn’t even call them to say so. We ghosted them. It’s definitely one of my biggest regrets. We were young and silly.”
But then they went in different directions: Paris to superstardom, while Nicky — although there was vague scandal around a brief Vegas marriage to a childhood friend, Todd Meister (annulled after three months and which she dismissed as a “whim”) — fulfilled the debutante role their parents had expected of both daughters. She launched a fashion line, Nicholai, and met her husband-to-be at the Rome wedding of Petra Ecclestone to James Stunt (now ended) in 2011. “At the reception, Paris was talking to some boy. I was standing there like a third wheel and he introduced himself. I thought, ‘This is the cutest accent. He’s so handsome and adorable.’ There was instant chemistry.”
After a three-year long-distance relationship, Rothschild proposed on a boat in Lake Como. They decided to marry in London in 2015 — “I’d always wanted a destination wedding, but I didn’t want the countryside. I wanted it somewhere convenient so people didn’t have to get on shuttle buses [between the reception and the hotel],” says Nicky. The gown was couture Valentino, the venue the Orangery at Kensington Palace. The Hilton clan took over Claridge’s. Guests at the wedding eve party at Spencer House in St James’s included Naomi Campbell, Chelsea Clinton and Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece.
The only hitch came as they headed to church. “We were running late because my mum runs late. I was walking really fast to the car. I felt a tug — my veil was under a tyre. There were all these cameras, so I just pulled it and kept walking, but there was a huge tear.”
She pulls out a photo of this disaster, which a friend recently posted on Instagram. “I was like, why are you retraumatising me? That veil, then being late when my husband is so punctual…” Was she really sweaty en route? “Yes. But in the end it was a magical day.”
Dress, edelinelee.com. Shoes, malonesouliers.com. Gloves, corneliajames.com. Earrings, self-portrait.com DAN KENNEDY for the times magazine
Since then, despite being scions of two of the richest, most talked about families in the world, the Hilton Rothschilds have lived a life of impeccable discretion — notwithstanding the wider family’s continuing embroilment with the reality business, with Kathy featuring intermittently with her sisters, Kim and Kyle Richards, in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills since 2020.
“To be honest, initially I was not on board with that. I know those shows thrive on drama and craziness. I know Mum’s decision came out of sheer boredom during the pandemic. But her unfiltered charm is hysterical. I’ve always known she was entertaining; now the world gets to see it. My friends are obsessed with her.”
Nicky has never stopped working, travelling all over the world to collaborate with different brands. Why? She doesn’t need the money. “I enjoy work,” she says. “I’d be so bored if I didn’t. A lot of people I grew up with who come from big families haven’t done a lot, have been given everything, and a lot of them aren’t happy. You need purpose and drive. I come from a line of entrepreneurs. Our parents always told us we had to make a name for ourselves.” Brief fulfilled.
The La Coqueta x Nicky Hilton collaboration is available at lacoquetakids.com
Hair Charley McEwen at the Only Agency using Oribe Make-up Rachel Singer-Clark at the Only Agency using Charlotte Tilbury