Spice Girl. Aspiring solo singer. Queen of the Wags. Tabloid figure of fun. Celebrated fashion designer. Head of Britain’s other royal family. Across three decades in the public eye, Victoria Beckham has undergone a very public metamorphosis, the likes of which few stars would have been able to pull off.
If, for example, around the time that Spice World was released in cinemas in 1997, you’d learnt that the Posh one in the “little Gucci dress” would actually end up showing her collections at Paris Fashion Week (and the crowd would lap it up), you’d be forgiven for raising a sceptical eyebrow. And yet, since her girl band days, Victoria has managed to flip the script on her public persona almost entirely. “I wouldn’t call it a reinvention,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2020. “I’d say it’s been an evolution.”
The next step in this “evolution”? Her latest incarnation as a Netflix star. Victoria Beckham, a three-part documentary, arrives on the streaming platform today, and promises to look back at her music career and life in the spotlight, as well as delving into the struggles she’s faced while building her eponymous fashion brand. “It takes quite a lot to make me cry, but I did cry,” the 51-year-old recently told The Sunday Times of her filming experience.
This apparently more candid, less guarded Victoria is miles away from the woman who’d famously refuse to smile in photos. So how has she pulled off such an effective reputational 180?
Rewind to the late Nineties when Victoria Adams was best known as one-fifth (later one-quarter) of the Spice Girls. Her girlband star status meant that when she started dating rising footballer David Beckham, she was very much the more famous half of the pair. After the band split in 2001, though, having never really bounced back from Geri Halliwell’s departure a few years earlier, she seemed to flounder a little.
Her solo efforts failed to launch, and her public persona wasn’t exactly burnished by the fact that she tended to be blamed for distracting “Golden Balls” David from his career on the pitch. Whenever he performed badly, Victoria and her flash showbiz lifestyle were implicitly at fault. “He was never a problem until he got married,” Alex Ferguson, Manchester United manager (and David’s mentor), once said.
With their matchy-matchy, label-laden designer outfits and ever-changing hairstyles, the pair became the poster couple for the more-is-more celebrity culture of the Noughties: posing on thrones wearing complementary purple getups for their wedding reception was just the beginning. As the tabloid attention on Posh and Becks and their young family increased, Victoria seemed to retreat behind massive sunglasses, appearing stony-faced in photos; it was a tactic that resulted in her being painted as the icy foil to her warm, amenable husband. She’s since revealed that her unimpressed expression was rooted in insecurities about her skin. “Everyone else saw a woman who looked grumpy and stern,” she told The Sunday Times last year. “I suppose that’s how I got the reputation of being such a miserable cow.”
When Victoria made her first proper foray into fashion design, expectations weren’t exactly sky high. The year was 2008: her personal style was synonymous with big handbags, bigger shades and form-fitting Wag gear (for a case in point, look at the all-pink ensemble she wore to the press conference marking her husband’s arrival at LA Galaxy, crowned with the bleach blonde, asymmetric “Pob” that launched a thousand copycat cuts).
But instead of opting for all the bells and whistles of a classic celeb brand launch, Victoria chose to tiptoe quietly into the world of fashion. Her debut collection comprised just 10 simple, cleverly tailored dresses, and she invited just a select coterie of tastemakers along to view it in New York, rather than emptying out the contents of her VIP address book.
You could practically hear the surprise as the world’s fashion editors shared their positive reviews: The Times’s critic Lisa Armstrong admitted “I can’t quite believe I’m writing this” before hailing Victoria’s debut as “a very impressive, accomplished collection, with not a single dud”.
Of course, it always helps if the clothes themselves are great, but Beckham’s unexpected candour was a winner too. From the start, she was upfront about the fact that she had no traditional fashion training; she admits that she can draw designs, “but badly”, and that she is more responsible for the overall creative vision than the nitty-gritty of pattern cutting. When the brand first launched, she would carefully talk editors and buyers through her creative choices and inspirations, lending the proceedings a more personal touch.
For some celebrities, effortlessness is everything; part of their mystique is the fact that they somehow seem to “have it all” while barely breaking a sweat. Victoria Beckham, though, is not that kind of celeb. Instead, she has never been afraid to admit to being a grafter. “At school, I had to work really hard to get less than average grades,” she told Allure. “When I was dancing and singing, I had to work really hard to be good, but was never good enough.”
It’d be silly to claim that Victoria’s experience of the industry has been anything like the slog that, say, an aspiring Central Saint Martins graduate might experience while attempting to launch their own brand: from the start, she’s had significant financial backing behind her. But it’d also be churlish to ignore the fact that she has certainly paid her dues, rather than simply expecting success to come her way because of her last name. “The difference is I wanted to learn the industry, not just throw out something that might promise a return,” she recently told The Sunday Times. “I wanted to understand and learn my trade.”
After starting small, Victoria graduated to bigger catwalks and won over major industry names like Anna Wintour; it wasn’t until the brand was a more established venture that her famous family turned out for her runway shows en masse (though those photo opportunities were certainly a clever profile-boost). In 2014, she opened her first store in London’s Dover Street; five years later, she launched a spin-off beauty brand, and in 2022, the label started showing at Paris Fashion Week, perhaps the biggest sign yet that it had truly been accepted by tastemakers. Very few celebrity fashion brands have enjoyed anything close to the staying power of Victoria’s label; fewer still are actually respected by industry insiders (perhaps the only other celebrity brand to enjoy a similar status is Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s The Row).
Victoria has always been much funnier than we gave her credit for
Although the label is a red carpet favourite, worn by the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and the Princess of Wales, its financial losses have also been well documented (with a certain level of schadenfreude, shall we say). However, despite it being a tricky market for luxury fashion right now, last year, sales grew by 26 per cent to £112.7m. This marked the fourth year on the run that the brand had reported double-digit revenue growth (its operating losses, however, hit £1.6m, up from £215,000 in 2023, which clouds the picture somewhat). The beauty arm of the business, offering a more accessible slice of Beckham-approved luxury, is thought to have buoyed its fortunes; one of her Satin Kajal eyeliner products reportedly sells every 30 seconds.
Victoria’s image is, of course, carefully curated. But over the past decade or so, she has certainly put the work in to dismantle some old preconceptions; her public reputation as unsmiling, humourless and a little bit chilly, for example. She’s always been much funnier than we gave her credit for. You only have to look at her high-camp, tongue-in-cheek 2007 documentary Victoria Beckham: Coming to America to realise that she’s always been willing to play up to the ridiculousness of her persona – although the doc was perhaps so deadpan that viewers couldn’t tell if she was being serious or not.
Social media has helped her put across her personality in a way she never could when paparazzi shots and tabloid headlines were her main conduit to the public. Over on Instagram, she will share sweet (albeit stage-managed) insights into family life and will happily poke fun at her hit-and-miss Spice Girls performances (“I can joke about it better than anybody,” she previously told Allure. “I’ll take the mickey out of myself.”) And imbuing some of her designs with a sense of self-aware fun has helped cultivate a sense that she’s in on the joke, too, like when she launched T-shirts bearing slogans like “Fashion stole my smile” and “I can’t concentrate in flats”.
Her cameos in her husband’s Netflix documentary, 2023’s Beckham, only helped to further soften her public persona – not least the inadvertently hilarious moment when she declared herself to be “very working class”, only for David to pop his head around the door to remind her that her dad would drive her to school in a Rolls-Royce. She recently told The Sunday Times that she initially “didn’t love me in that documentary”, but the response to that viral clip helped her see things differently.
The public, it seemed, really warmed to this unguarded VB. Perhaps that’s why she agreed to a Netflix series of her own. She’s described the filming process as being “almost like therapy”, but as ever with the Beckhams, we can probably expect there to be limits to this much-vaunted openness. A deep dive into the rumoured rift between oldest son Brooklyn, his wife Nicola Peltz and the rest of the family, for example, seems pretty unlikely. One thing we can certainly predict, though, is that Victoria will emerge as her brand’s own best advert.
‘Victoria Beckham’ is out on Netflix
