Denise Welch has branded her future daughter-in-law Gabbriette Bechtel her 'style icon' and revealed that she even gets to wear the supermodel's 'cast-offs'. The Loose Women star, 67, gushed over the stunner, 28, who has been engaged to her musician son Matty Healy, 37, since 2024.
Denise said: 'I don’t understand high fashion but I live vicariously through my daughter-in-law to be, Gabbriette and what she’s wearing. I get some cast-offs from Gabi because she works for Adidas and Gucci.' The Waterloo Road actress also said that she had recently hired her own stylist who helps her dress for swanky events.
However, Denise was less complimentary about her son and his The 1975 bandmates' fashion choices, branding them 'ridiculous'. 'The young men with the prison trousers round their thighs. The 1975 started at our house in the northeast when Matty and the band were 13, so throughout their teens they’d walk from the house to the outbuilding where they rehearsed like f***ing penguins because their trousers were so low.'
Before adding to The Times: 'I see Jaden Smith still doing it. We don’t want to see your underpants. It’s ridiculous.'
Matty and Gabbriette have been linked since September 2023, when they were spotted packing on the PDA in New York City, shortly after his well-publicised split from Taylor Swift in June that year. The couple went on to announce their engagement in June 2024 after a whirlwind nine-month romance, with the model showing off her black diamond ring on Instagram.
Matty's mum Denise later gave her fans a glimpse into her son and Gabbriette's engagement party in California. Denise cuddled up to her daughter-in-law-to-be as she took to her Instagram Stories and re-shared an image from the model's account of the pair looking as glamorous as ever. The bride-to-be simply captioned the adorable snap: 'MAMA.'
It comes after Taylor Swift fans said they believed that her ex Matty may have sent a subtle message to the singer on stage more than two years after their split. A video shared on the 'Travis and Taylor' subreddit page showed Healy playing some notes on a piano during a performance, and many Swifties theorized he was playing the opening notes of Swift's 2024 hit 'The Black Dog'.
The moment occurred while he was visiting England's Gateshead College near Newcastle to lead a songwriting workshop with students, per Stereogum. In the clip, the 1975 singer, who has since moved on and is engaged to model Gabbriette, was seen sitting as he played the keyboard, and the melody sounded almost identical to the opening of Swift's song.
On Reddit, many fans believed that Healy was taking a swipe at Swift by playing the chords and the comment section was ablaze with theories - though some claimed he was actually showing the crowd how to play a 1975 tune. 'Oh he loves adding fuel to the fire I guess haha,' one person wrote. Another agreed, 'I think he loves to troll to be honest.' 'He loves sending her messages,' someone else typed. A fourth user wrote, 'I also think we can now say that he listened to the album? I remember when the album came out, he was out on the street and someone asked him about the album and he said he didn’t listen to it.'
Swift sings about discovering that her ex hadn't turned his location off despite their split. She sees he's visiting a bar called The Black Dog, which is located in London - a place where she is rumored to have visited before with Healy. According to Elle Magazine, there are many lines that lead fans to believe the song could be about Healy, including the fact that she references in the track that her ex was dating someone younger than her, which he did twice after briefly dating her. Other fans believe that it could be about her longtime ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, who she dated from 2016 to 2023.
