Nina Dobrev wasn’t attending Carolina Herrera’s Spring 2025 show at New York Fashion Week just to observe the parade ’80s polka dots and Georgia O’Keefe-coded blossom yellows. Her arrival in the front row, in a chic matching set designed by the house and styled by Kate Young, marked a long-anticipated fashion comeback for the actress.
“If I'm being completely honest and vulnerable, I've been sort of behind the scenes for the last four or five months because I had a pretty bad injury and surgery,” Dobrev tells me over the phone a few hours after the show. The Vampire Diaries star had sustained a severe knee injury after a dirt bike accident in May. She’s studiously tracked the “baby steps” of her recovery process on social media in the weeks since.
Dobrev needed strength to take strides back into the spotlight at fashion week—especially when she was doing it in heels. But returning to New York was always going to be worthwhile. “Just coming out and doing my first fashion week since the injury, wearing high heels for the first time again since the surgery, I was a little nervous. But I was also excited—when you're not doing anything for that long and recovering, I miss the fashion. I miss being in New York. I miss the excitement of fashion week,” she says.
Her comeback outfit had to meet two criterion: It had to be “chic and timeless." Easier said than done. Those adjectives can apply to a lot of Wes Gordon’s designs for Carolina Herrera—so many, she ended up pulling two looks. One she’s keeping under wraps is being saved for another event in a few weeks. The other, a matching skirt set, made the front row cut.
Dobrev’s outfit began with a short black jacket, featuring trellises of white beaded flowers blooming along the neckline and exaggerated puff sleeves. She wore it fastened at the top without a shirt underneath, instead pairing it with a matching miniskirt featuring the same petal-like embellishments along the hem and a silver mini bag. “I felt very, very chic and yet still edgy at the same time,” Dobrev says.
Then there were the aforementioned heels: black, pointed-toe, with even more beading. Dobrev tells me the brand had offered her flats. It was considerate, but just not right for the look. (Spoken like a true fashion girl.)
“I really felt like the look needed a heel and I was anxious,” Dobrev says. “I was very nervous that I was going to fall.” Young, her stylist, stepped in, buying her a cane to support her on her walk to the front row.
After hairstylist Bridget Brager secured Dobrev's high power ponytail—the better to emphasize her earrings and the beading along her jacket—and makeup artist Patrick Ta perfected her soft, romantic makeup look, Dobrev made it to the runway she’d been waiting for. She mingled with the likes of Karlie Kloss and Chloe Fineman; counted more than one polka dot dress she’d want to request for a future red carpet; and bonded with Gordon’s mom, who she sat next to at the show. The one thing she didn’t do was fall. “Luckily there were no mishaps, everything went smoothly and I debuted my new knee, as you might say, at the Carolina show, which was really fun,” Dobrev laughs.
She’d had a lot of time to think about this moment before it finally came. Now that Dobrev’s made it through her first show, she’s ready for an even bigger fashion reset. “I feel like I'm ready to elevate my game and be selective and be conscious. I usually in the past have been so ‘go with the flow,’ but I want to be more specific and intentional about what I wear going forward,” she explains.
All those months of recovery, of physical therapy and purely comfy clothes, primed Dobrev for a radical shift. A metamorphosis, if you will. “I had to, you know, cocoon, and now I'm excited to butterfly out of my little cocoon and sort of find my style identity down the line,” she says.
The transformation starts with one little matching set and could expand in all sorts of directions. For now, Dobrev says, “I'm very excited to be back in the city and back on my feet, quite literally.”
