For somebody who lives their life in the public eye, there’s always been something mysterious about Victoria Beckham.
Luckily for us, though, a new documentary series about her life has just landed on Netflix. Titled Victoria Beckham, it’s a deep dive into the former Spice Girl’s life and rise to prominence as a fashion designer in her own right.
Reviews have been mixed (read the Standard’s take here), but it is bursting with funny, surreal and relatable anecdotes from her life. Here are some of the best.
Her parents remortgaged to send her to drama school
One thing we find out pretty much from the start? Victoria was always destined to be a singer. We see lots of photos of her as a girl, performing: originally, she wanted to do musical theatre.
“I was definitely a loner at school,” she says. “I was bullied. I was awkward. I didn’t fit in at all. But when you’re on stage, for that moment, you’re somebody else. I didn’t really want to be me, I didn’t like me. I desperately wanted to be liked.”
She also used to “love to dance”, and her parents ended up remortgaging their house to send her to theatre school (there is, alas, no mention of the Rolls Royce that used to pick her up from school).
“I was a performer,” she adds. “I knew every single lyric of every single song in the West End.” This love fed into her audition for the Spice Girls, for which she ended up singing ‘Mein Herr’ from Cabaret – unlike the other girls, who stuck with more tried-and-tested artists like Whitney Houston.
Why she doesn’t smile
Victoria is infamous for remaining stony faced in front of the camera, but that isn’t always deliberate, she says. When she stands next to David for a couple’s photo, he takes the left hand position — the side that her preferred smile is most visible. “I didn't realise that when I smile, which I do, I smile from the left,” she says. “If I smile from the right, I look unwell. Consequently, I'm smiling from the inside, but no one sees."
She does concede, however, that sometimes she doesn’t feel like smiling due to her insecurities in front of the camera. “The minute I see a camera I change,” she adds. “The barrier goes up, my armour goes on. The miserable cow who doesn’t smile — that’s when she comes out.”
She hogged the Spice Girls’ clothing budget
And really, why wouldn’t you? As the Spice Girls’ fame exploded, so too did their incomes, which meant a clothing allowance for the band. In one clip, Geri Halliwell complains, “You know what I end up getting? A £20 thing from Oxfam. She nicks all my money.”
“The other girls weren’t really into fashion. That left a really nice budget for me,” Victoria explains. She spent it in style. “I went to Gucci. I’d never ever owned a designer garment before. And then, fashion became everything.”
She suffered with an eating disorder
One of the documentary’s saddest moments involves Victoria opening up about her eating disorder, which was exacerbated by the massive media spotlight that was trained on her.
“We laugh about it and we joke about it when we’re on television. But I was really, really young, and that hurts,” she says. “I really started to doubt myself and not like myself, and because I let it affect me... you lose all sense of reality. I’m just very critical of myself. I didn’t like what I saw.”
She goes onto explain that the disorder was an attempt to take back control in her life. “I could control it with the clothing. I could control my weight and I was controlling it in an incredibly unhealthy way,” she says. “It really affects you when you’re being told constantly you’re not good enough.”
“When you have an eating disorder, you become very good at lying. I was never honest about it with my parents. I never talked about it publicly. It really affects you that you’re being told you’re constantly not good enough. And that’s been with me my whole life.”
For his part, David talks about people feeling it was “okay to criticise a woman for her weight” back in the day – adding that the woman who sat at home “in a tracksuit, smiling, laughing, having a glass of wine” started to fade as a result.
She buried her boobs in Baden-Baden
The summer of the 2006 world cup went down in pop culture history not for the footie scores but the WAG style. As all the wives and assorted girlfriends descended on Baden-Baden, Victoria was on newspapers around the world, rocking massive hair extensions, fake tan, massive sunglasses and too-small tops.
“I had big boobs, I had big hair,” she tells the cameras about her look. “Us ladies were shopping and we were owning it. I remember seeing one of these wives that had bought so many designer clothes and had so many bags that she couldn’t get in the revolving doors at the Baden-Baden hotel.”
But of course, when a career in fashion beckoned, she decided to trim the excess. Roland Mouret, who became a fashion mentor to her, was “very, very honest and really, really tough” about her desire to break into the industry. Victoria adds that he told her “the enemy was fear and lack of self esteem.” More accurately, “to make the dream become reality, we had to kill the WAG”.
This led to the iconic line: “I buried those boobs in Baden-Baden.”
“I became a simpler, more elegant version of myself,” she clarifies. They’re probably not literally buried there but... who knows?
She committed a major fashion faux-pas
Victoria’s first catwalk show was a doozy: at the height of her Spice Girls fame, she received an invite from Donatella Versace, no less, to attend her show.
"I met Victoria in 1997," Versace says. "My daughter, she was obsessed with the Spice Girls. I mean, obsessed."
In a real dream-come-true moment, Victoria was flown on a private jet to Milan, and invited to pick out any outfit she wanted from the brand ahead of the show.
"I remember trying on the dress, looking in the mirror and saying to someone in the store, 'I really like the dress, but, how about lets tighten it here, shorten it here,” she says. “I basically redesigned the whole dress. I really can't believe I did that. So rude."
Versace thought so too. "You shouldn't do it," she tells the cameras. "That's how I feel... I thought, 'How does she dare?'" Eek.
£70,000 for office plants? Bargain
It’s not easy being a fashion designer. In addition to creating and selling clothes worth thousands of pounds, there are also appearances to keep up. Perhaps this is why Victoria ended up spending an obscene £70k on office plants – or maybe she just has no price anchors after years of pop superstardom.
“One of the expenses was the office plants because she loved plants and it was costing, like, £70,000 a year,” investor David Belhassen explains. “And then there was someone who was coming to water the plants for £15,000 a year. And that’s only the beginning.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Belhassen ended up rescuing Beckham’s fashion company from bankruptcy. Nobody knows what happened to the plants though.
She was richer than David
One of the more surprising revelations from the documentary? Posh Spice used to be better off than Golden Balls. “When we met she was a lot richer than me,” David tells the cameras at one point. “She actually bought our first house in Hertfordshire, known as Beckingham Palace.” For the idly curious, this cost a whopping £2.5m back in the day, and is certainly worth considerably more now.
However, it was David that Victoria turned to when her fashion business almost went under, to the tune of millions of pounds.
“We looked at what I’d invested and I think part of that conversation broke my heart because Victoria is a proud woman,” David adds, while Victoria adds that she “almost lost everything” and “used to cry before I went to work every day.” Maybe next time, fewer potted plants.
Brooklyn is still MIA
One of the bigger mysteries that remains to be solved is what exactly is up with Brooklyn Beckham and the rest of the family. Unfortunately, this is something that looks to remain unsolved – although the documentary’s radio silence on the issue is kind of damning in itself.
What we get, in lieu of any explanations, is a rather brutal excising of poor old Brooklyn from the Beckham family dynamic. Harper pops up, as to Cruz and Romeo, but we only see Brooklyn (and wife Nicola Peltz) for a few seconds at Victoria’s fashion show in September 2024. A camera pan along the ranks of the family, then united, stops before it reaches the pair. Oof.
She’s partial to a glass
Celebs: they’re just like us! One of the doc’s more unscripted moments involves David opening a bottle of red wine one evening. The twist: they’re off to an event at “the Palace.”
Like any self-respecting Brit, the pair decide to take it with them. “What if I spill it?” Victoria asks, wearing a cream silk dress.
The answer: put it in a sippy cup. “Should put it through an intravenous drip, let’s be honest,” she adds. Just your average Friday night, then.
Victoria Beckham is streaming now on Netflix
