PrettyLittleThing founder Umar Kamani proposes to his model girlfriend in private theatre

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Billionaire PrettyLittleThing founder Umar Kamani has proposed to his glamorous model girlfriend Nada Adelle in an extravagant ceremony with a stunning $2million (£1.45million) diamond ring.

Professional photographers were on hand to capture the moment Umar, 33, who has built his fortune by selling cheap dresses to Gen Z partygoers, went down on one knee and popped the question in the Monte Carlo Opera House, which he hired out for the occasion. 

In typically extravagant fashion, Umar filled the historic theatre with 10,000 white roses, dozens of candles and 25 musicians who played Beauty and the Beast as radiant Nadia, 27, walked into the room. 

Although she is marrying the king of fast fashion, Nada eschewed his brands for a $2,500 (£1,790) slinky white gown with bejewelled straps and cut-out detailing from London-based, celebrity-loved designer David Koma for the occasion. 

The stunning dress perfectly complimented her ring – a 21-carat diamond sparkler flown in from New York celebrity jeweller Richard Nektalov.  

Umar, whose family built their fashion empire from a Manchester market stall into a multi-billion pound business, looked dapper in a $5,907 (£4,300) Tom Ford suit and $1million (£730,000) Patek Philippe watch.   

The breathtaking proposal is the culmination of a whirlwind romance for Umar and Nadia, who only stepped out publicly together for the first time in March 2020. 

Nada, who boasts 427,000 Instagram followers, is a model who has been featured in magazines such as Look Magazine and Harpers Bazaar.

The stunner, who delights in showcasing her jet-set lifestyle to her many fans on social media, has also fronted a campaign for Beyonce’s Ivy Park brand campaign, as well as working with make-up brand L’Oreal. 

Meanwhile, Umar, from Manchester, is the son of billionaire Boohoo founder Mahmud Kamani, who created his business after his father started working on a market stall in the city.

In 2012, Umar and his brother Adam co-founded PrettyLittleThing after witnessing the phenomenal success of Boohoo – with their company now enjoying a host of celebrity endorsements including from Love Island’s Molly-Mae Hague, girl band Little Mix, Nicole Scherzinger and Paris Hilton. 

Before he founded his firm, which had a turnover of £374million in 2018, Umar was an amateur boxer, who admitted to previously only caring about partying and chasing women.

The businessman lives a very glamorous lifestyle, filled with overseas trips, flashy cars and dazzling accessories, which he regularly photographs and fills his Instagram feed with.  

One day he’s ‘topping up his vitamin D’ in the infinity pool at the luxury Monastero Santa Rosa Hotel in Italy, where a sea view suite will set you back nearly £3,000 a night. 

The next, he’s at the wheel of a Riva yacht cruising along the Amalfi coast before posing on the bonnet of his £264,000 Rolls-Royce Dawn in Beverly Hills.

Or maybe he’d prefer his £300,000 Lamborghini Aventador roadster or the coupe version with personalised number plate. For more rugged trips, he has two Hummers and a £92,000 customised Mercedes G-class.

You’ll also find him lunching at Nobu in Malibu, California, in a pair of £450 Gucci slippers, with a gold Rolex on his arm. 

He hangs out with rapper P Diddy at the Grammys and Kylie Jenner at the Coachella music festival in California. All events are, naturally, recorded on his smartphone, which at one point had a £790 Louis Vuitton cover.

‘A lot of these people are my friends,’ he said of his celebrity circle. ‘Will.I.Am is a really good mate – we FaceTime nearly every day – as is P Diddy.’

In 2019, society bible Tatler named Umar its eighth most eligible bachelor, alongside the Duke of Roxburghe and former One Direction star Harry Styles. 

And such is his self-belief that when he wanted to launch PLT in the US four years ago, he offered a six-figure sum to reality TV star Kylie Jenner, half-sister of Kim Kardashian, to appear in one of his £15 orange dresses. 

‘It’s all about the hustle,’ he previously admitted. ‘I knew I wanted to be in those circles because I’m obsessed with power.’ 

Power duly followed. The Kylie Jenner coup led to sales increasing ten-fold and allowed him to buy a seven-bedroom mansion in the Hollywood Hills, complete with basketball court.

His five-year plan, he’s previously said, is ‘to make as much money as possible’ and escape his father’s shadow, admitting that half the reason Mahmud helped him start PrettyLittleThing was to ‘get me on the right track’. 

‘I’m a rich man’s son and that’s not what I want to be,’ he said. ‘So yes, I have got something to prove. I want to be the rich man. I want to be the successful person.’ He added: ‘If you’re going to be in competition, I would rather keep it in the family.’ 

Umar and his fiancée Nada made their first public outing together in March 2020, a month after going Instagram official, with the couple attending the Yeezy Season 8 show during Paris Fashion Week.

In 2006, Umar started working for the fashion family business as a manager, while attending theatre school. He went on to study international business at Manchester Metropolitan University. 

He founded PLT in 2012 with his brother Adam, and by 2022, the company is forecast to be worth around £2.1billion. 

But Umar’s family has a rag to riches story. Mahmud’s father Abdullah moved the family to Kenya, where many Indian families had prospered under the British Empire.

Mahmud was born there in 1964, but four years later the Kamanis were forced to flee to Britain by increasing unrest and draconian employment laws that favoured native Kenyans.

They settled in Manchester, where the entrepreneurial Abdullah sold handbags on a market stall to feed his family, before investing in property and founding the wholesale textile business Pinstripe, where Mahmud worked, using family connections in India to source garments.

By the early 2000s, the firm was selling nearly £50 million of clothing a year to High Street names such as New Look, Primark and Philip Green’s Topshop.

Spotting the potential in the growth of the internet, Mahmud set up his online retailer in 2006 that would deliver their own-branded fashion at rock bottom prices, starting out with just three staff and operating out of a Manchester warehouse.

Today it has a workforce of more than 2,900, and celebrity advocates including everyone from Little Mix to Tallia Storm.