One thing has remained an earnestly voiced constant as Adrien Brody’s best actor winning streak continues: the pride and gratitude that the star of The Brutalist expresses in his victory speeches for his girlfriend, the fashion designer Georgina Chapman.
For the ex-wife of the jailed movie magnate Harvey Weinstein, whose own reputation was tarnished when Weinstein’s #MeToo scandal dominated the headlines, the 2025 film awards season has sealed a triumphant return to the stage — all while dressed in some of her label Marchesa’s most stunning creations.
Standing alongside Brody on 2025’s highest-profile red carpets must be a particularly sweet, symbolic victory for Chapman, finally laying to rest, in the most public way possible, a period of time when she and Marchesa were jettisoned from elite favor. No longer. The queen of fairytale couture is very much back, dressed in her own designs.
This visual statement of reasserted power chimes with Chapman’s stealth reinvention in the wake of her divorce from Weinstein. There have been few tell-all interviews and zero teary confessionals. Instead, after a key statement of support by the Vogue and Condé Nast supremo Anna Wintour, Chapman has quietly rebuilt her life and her brand.
Last Sunday, scooping the Bafta for his role as the architect Laszlo Toth in The Brutalist (with successes at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice awards behind him, and the SAG awards and Oscars possibly to come), Brody paid tribute to Chapman in the most emphatic terms.
“Thank you to my wonderful British girlfriend, Georgina Chapman …” he said as the camera cut to a beaming Chapman, a round of applause breaking out, “… who’s an angel, and if it wasn’t for you and my wonderful parents I would not be here, so fortunately standing before you.”
Brody’s Golden Globes tribute to Chapman was even more lavish. Alongside again thanking his parents, he seemed to reference her struggles. “I would not be standing here before you [the audience] if it wasn’t for you [Chapman]. There was a time not too long ago that I felt that this might never be a moment afforded to me again, so thank you.”
Alongside Brody’s panegyrics, Chapman has been conducting her own hard and soft sell as the most effective ambassador for her brand, looking drop-dead fabulous in a series of Marchesa gowns, all swiftly posted to Marchesa’s Instagram page with full descriptions and links to Chapman’s personal page.
The queen of fairytale couture is very much back, dressed in her own designs.
Chapman and Brody have been together since 2019, having met on a trip to Puerto Rico, where they discovered they shared a birthday (April 14; he 1973, she 1976). People magazine confirmed their relationship in 2020. Their public debut as a couple — on the Tribeca Film Festival red carpet — came in 2021.
The evolution of the relationship followed the implosion of Chapman’s marriage to Weinstein, whom she met in 2004, the same year that Chapman and Keren Craig, who met at art college, co-founded Marchesa. The friends named the label after the Marchesa Luisa Casati, an eccentric 20th-century Italian heiress, because of “her fearless approach to fashion, being a living work of art”, as Chapman told The Times in 2013.
Chapman and Weinstein married in 2007 at a lavish ceremony attended by stars including Jennifer Lopez, Cameron Diaz, Renée Zellweger and Naomi Watts. They had two children, India Pearl and Dashiell Max Robert. (Weinstein also has three children — Remy, Emma and Ruth — from his previous marriage to Eve Chilton.)
In 2013 Chapman said of Weinstein: “He is probably the most charismatic person you’ll ever meet. He’s an extraordinary man and an extraordinary talent. He is my husband and I love him. I love being married. Everyone said, ‘You won’t feel any different,’ but I think you do. I’m romantic. Look at my clothes!”
In 2017 came multiple bombshell allegations, first reported by The New York Times and The New Yorker, of sexual assault and misconduct against Weinstein by women including celebrities such as Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan and Asia Argento.
Questions swirled over what Chapman did and did not know about Weinstein’s behavior, as well as about his financial involvement with Marchesa and his attempts to force actresses, including Jennifer Aniston, Sienna Miller and Felicity Huffman, to wear Marchesa on the red carpet.
“My heart breaks for all the women who have suffered tremendous pain because of these unforgivable actions. I have chosen to leave my husband. Caring for my young children is my first priority and I ask the media for privacy at this time,” Chapman said in a statement to People in 2017. (She received a reported $15 to $20 million — £12 to £16 million — in their divorce agreement.)
In a separate statement Weinstein said he supported Chapman’s decision to leave him: “I understand, I love her and I love our children, and hopefully, when I am better, I will be in their lives again.”
“He’s an extraordinary man,” said Georgina Chapman of her then-husband, Harvey Weinstein.
For a time Marchesa’s dresses disappeared from the red carpet, and Chapman’s reputation and business seemed irreparably sullied. Then, in May 2018, Wintour wrote a Vogue editor’s note in support of the designer; a sympathetic profile of Chapman ran in the same issue.
“I had what I thought was a very happy marriage. I loved my life,” Chapman told Vogue. “There was a part of me that was terribly naive. I have moments of rage, I have moments of confusion, I have moments of disbelief! And I have moments when I just cry for my children. What are their lives going to be?”
The first sign that all might not be professionally lost came when Scarlett Johansson wore Marchesa to that year’s Met Gala, which Wintour oversees.
The following year Chapman’s relationship with Brody began.
“He was a kid from Queens who really embraced the culture of the streets,” Chapman said of Brody in a Vogue profile of Brody published last month. “Yet he also carries a very European elegance, which gives this wonderful complexity.”
“Anything that comes into his life gets held,” Chapman added. “It’s painful, good and bad; but he’s able to draw on this enormous universe inside him. It does exhaust him because he gives so much. He’s very sensitive, he has a very thin veil emotionally with the world.”
Brody paints in an art studio at their upstate New York home. Their life there “is low-key: hiking, cooking”, Vogue reported. “If he’s in the midst of inhabiting a role, he’s up in the office, reading, covered in cats,” Chapman said.
The blossoming of Chapman and Brody’s relationship has occurred alongside Marchesa’s red-carpet renaissance, with stars including Chelsea Handler seen wearing the label in the past year. One New York-based publicist, who has observed Chapman’s rehabilitation closely, said: “I think people, women especially, are tired of seeing other women being blamed for the abuses of men. Georgina’s beauty and confidence emanates from the inside out and is clearly reflected in her designs.”
In his own possible reversal of fortune, Weinstein will face a retrial on rape charges in Manhattan in April, after New York State’s Court of Appeals overturned his initial conviction last year. Initially sentenced to 23 years in jail in New York, Weinstein remains incarcerated, having been sentenced to a further 16 years in a Los Angeles trial that featured a separate set of rape and sexual assault charges.
“I think people, women especially, are tired of seeing other women being blamed for the abuses of men.”
A source close to Weinstein told the Daily Mail: “He sees his two children by Georgina; they talk to him on the phone too. He has maintained a good relationship with them. Being close to them means the world to him. There’s no acrimony with Georgina. He’s happy for her and hopes that continues to be the case. They have a cordial relationship. They talk about things that are necessary for the children and that’s about it.”
Whatever happens to her ex-husband, Chapman has shown her capacity to survive and thrive, right now very visibly blooming on the awards circuit alongside Brody.
“Let them say what they say,” Chapman once told The Times of those who criticized her extravagantly ethereal dresses. “The important thing is the client and if she’s happy.”
And anyway, as she also told The Times, she loved “the idea of the fairytale”.
Tim Teeman is a senior editor and writer at the Daily Beast
