THE VICTORIAN ERA
As Victoria Beckham celebrates the 10th anniversary of her eponymous label, she is determined to look forward and go her own way. By Tim Blanks. Styled by Christine Centenera. Photographed by Bibi Cornejo Borthwick.
As Victoria Beckham celebrates the 10th anniversary of her eponymous label, she is determined to look forward and go her own way, writes Tim Blanks.
In April 2008, the fashion world didn’t yet know what to make of Victoria Beckham. She had aspirations as a designer, but so did a dozen other celebrities eager to amortise their popular profiles. Then suddenly, surprisingly, she fronted the latest Juergen Teller-lensed campaign for Marc Jacobs, the unimpeachable crown prince of cool at the time. Teller shot her knees-up in a giant Marc bag, like she was … gasp! … making fun of her public image as pouty, flashy, fashion-obsessed Posh. Fast-forward a decade, Beckham’s back in the bag and Juergen Teller is once again the photographer. She has reclaimed and recreated that 2008 moment for herself. This time, it’s her advertising campaign, her name on the bag. And now the fashion world knows just who she is. In hindsight, they could have winkled out all sorts of insights from that original shoot for Marc Jacobs: her ambition and fearlessness, her insecurity and naivety and, above all, her sense of humour. That will keep anyone sane during the most trying of times, but it has stood her in particularly good stead. In my various encounters with Beckham over the years, I’ve always walked away wishing that the cynics and naysayers who’ve dogged her since the heady heights of the Spice Girls could see and appreciate how funny she is, although I doubt even the drollest droll would soften the most trolling trolls. In that, Beckham reminds me of Donatella Versace, another public figure who has weathered the slingshots and arrows of celebrity while managing to maintain a healthy, humorous perspective. Come to think of it, both women have adopted a similar survival strategy, a formidable public persona – Donatella the Blonde, Victoria the Glum – that armours them against the outside world and allows them to hide in public.
Beckham is celebrating her 10th anniversary in business this year. “What I’ve accomplished within 10 years is far more than I could have dreamed,” she says. “I feel like I’ve been doing this a lifetime. I live and breathe this brand seven days a week: I never switch off, I never go on holiday and turn my phone or email off. This is my fifth child.” A decade ago, Victoria Beckham the label consisted of three people in a studio in London’s Battersea, on the other side of the river. The first time she visited Net-A-Porter’s headquarters in West London, Beckham famously wondered why she couldn’t have all that for herself. All she had to do was work – and wait. The anniversary year has seen spectacular developments: a new CEO, Paolo Riva; a new chairman, industry veteran Ralph Toledano; new investors; and a new HQ. It’s an impressive multi-storey block in Hammersmith, four minutes by car from her home in Holland Park. “I have a parking space,” she marvels. The first time Beckham drove past the building with her children, they WOW-ed. A hundred people work inside, and she insists she knows each of them by name. “I work closely with everyone.”
The magic word in her new chapter is “strategy”. With a team of seasoned professionals ready to take her business to the next level, she says: “I feel I can really put my foot on the gas. There is so much I want to do.” Looking around at her impressive new space, you can’t help but wonder what Beckham hoped for when she started. “I didn’t look that far into the future. I knew as a woman what I wanted and I couldn’t find it. There were just three of us; we weren’t developing our own fabrics then, and we had to be sensible. If we added a pocket detail, that put the price up. I was very much just going season to season instead of looking at the bigger picture.”
Still, there was that fierce ambition. From the beginning, Beckham looked to the big American brands for inspiration, which is why she showed in New York. “The great thing about living in America was showing in America. Back then, it was a bigger stage, there were more buyers going to New York and you could start selling immediately after the show.”
“There was a way in the industry of doing things,” she continues. “I knew there were rules I had to abide by, but I wanted to be entrepreneurial and find different ways of doing things. I was a pop star who turned into a fashion designer and I didn’t want to do things the same way everyone else was doing them. And probably because I was a little naive, I wasn’t scared to take on those challenges in my own way.” I remember when Beckham launched her first collections, she would walk journalists round the racks of clothes, enthusing about the fabric and the details like she was a fan rather than their designer. She won over the hardened press mavens.
One of the first items Beckham put her name to was nicknamed ‘the sucky-sucky dress’, because of the way it was fitted, to suck you in and hold you tight. “I wasn’t afraid to do that; it was probably quite refreshing,” she says now. At the same time, she concedes that the way she dressed was probably a sign of her insecurity. “Now it’s less about me wanting to be seen. It’s not so much about me, it’s about what I’m creating for other women. When I used to go out, it was: ‘Watch what I eat for lunch, because I’ve got a tight dress and I need a flat tummy.’ I mean, who can be bothered with that now? I’m too busy. I’m older and things like that don’t matter to me.”
This journey – from insecure fashion tyro to figurehead of a business valued at £100 million when she sold a minority stake last year – has made Beckham emblematic of her client base.
“I am my customer,” she agrees. And she obsesses over striking the right balance between fashion and relatability. “I’m very aware that people are going to write about your collection, and you need to have newness and freshness, but when I look at the sales of my more ‘fashion-y’ seasons, my customer can’t necessarily relate to those in the way the press can.” She mentions a venture into crushed velvet as one instance that didn’t click, but it’s those kind of risks that have brought her to her 10th-anniversary collection, where all things Beckham are distilled into a highly relatable package.
She decided to show it in London, rather than New York, in Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, next door to her store. “It made sense for my 10th anniversary. I’m from England, my brand is British, I was excited to celebrate with family members who’ve never had a chance to see a show.” The show wasn’t a retrospective, although it registered the strong codes Beckham has established for her brand: the striking use of colour, the wide trousers, the smart, business-y shirts and jackets, the sensual layering, the impressive sense of a real wardrobe.
“I’ve always said this is not a vanity project for me: this is a business,” Beckham says determinedly. “Yes, I could very easily put showpieces in the collection, but what’s the point?” Well, the point would be me, dying to know what a Victoria Beckham showpiece would look like. “Oh, I don’t know. Drag out those old Spice Girls costumes? Spice up your life!” She laughs heartily at the idea.
“You need newness and freshness, but when I look at the sales of my more ‘fashion-y’ seasons, my customer can’t relate to those in the way the press can”
And that introduces the elephant in the room. As much as she was anticipating her first show on British soil, Beckham also acknowledged her strange relationship with the UK press. “Would I have the career I have now if I’d shown here first?” she mused. Rather than a pop star who turned into a fashion designer, it may make more sense to consider her the other way round, as a fashion designer who turned into a pop star. But the Spice Girls are never going to go away, however much Beckham became the woman who left the Spice Girl behind. She recognises as much when she says: “I knew as a woman what I wanted …” She pauses, looks slyly at me and adds: “…what I really, really wanted.” (By the way, she claims Wannabe was never a favourite.) “I always wanted to do fashion, so I was lucky that music was never my main passion. For the other girls it was. Every day someone says: ‘Are you going on tour? You’re the one who’s stopping it.’ For me, there was always something else I wanted to do. Plan B, phase two. Even when I was in the group, on tour, I was always more interested in not just the costumes but the lighting and the set design. It was never just about getting on stage and dancing around.
“I was with Elton John this weekend and I told him: ‘You’re the reason why I stopped the Spice Girls.’ I went to see him in Vegas in doing The Red Piano, where David LaChapelle curated the most incredible show with him, and I remember sitting there very near to the front and looking at him singing those songs he’d sung time after time, year after year, and his passion and his enjoyment was incredible, even after all that time. And a few nights later, I was on stage at Madison Square Garden with the Spice Girls and I thought: ‘It’s almost like a waste that I’m given this opportunity. I appreciate the time I’ve had with the girls, but I don’t have what Elton can have after all these years.’ There was nothing there, other than that my kids were in the audience and I wanted them to see Mummy doing the Spice Girls.”
Mummy’s been doing a lot of Spice Girls since then. Her seven-year- old, Harper, is obsessed with them. “While we were on holiday, Spice World was on heavy rotation on the iPad. When I filmed that, they made me wear a little army dress instead of the combat pants everyone else was wearing and I was really upset at the time because my weight throughout the Spice Girls went up-down-up-down and I really didn’t want to wear a tight little camouflage dress. But now Harper looks at it and she finds it really hilarious. ‘Mummy, why are you wearing that minidress?’ You have a whole other appreciation for that movie when you watch it years later.”
Beckham says Harper has also latched on to Spice World’s Posh-defining Gucci dress moment. “She does the dance and she says: ‘Is it a Gucci dress? Is it a Gucci dress? I want a little Gucci dress.’ And then she asks me: ‘Mummy, what’s a Gucci dress?’”
It must be quite bonding to have something like Spice World as an aidememoire for your kids, especially when the hair and make-up of the 90s conspired to make you look older than you do now. Maybe it’s kind of healing as well. Beckham gets to sing and dance along with her daughter to Spice Girls favourites. Her own personal pick is Too Much, because, she says, “you can get a nice, easy, little groove going”, although she really gave her all to Spice Up Your Life at a much-shared dance-off during her after-show party at Mark’s Club.
Next on the agenda is Australia. David is going to the Invictus Games in Sydney, so they decided to make a family outing of it. “The only time I’ve been there before was with the Spice Girls, 24 hours in Sydney and Melbourne,” Beckham says. “When you’re young and travelling the world like that, you’d sit in your hotel room and watch TV. When you’re older, you want to get out and see things.” She claims she’s a little nervous: a long journey with kids, not knowing what to expect at the other end, although she says she has very good customers in Australia, some of whom made the trip to see her anniversary show in London. I don’t know why she’s worried. The Beckham brood was always famously the best-behaved in the business. Brooklyn, now 19, is interning with photographer Nick Knight in London. Romeo, 16, wants to do “something in tennis”. Cruz, 13, plays guitar and piano, and writes his own songs. And Harper, according to her mum, wants to be an inventor. Not one of them is interested in football, Beckham adds a little ruefully. You have to feel for David.
Their family is testament to the strength of a relationship that has been as ruthlessly scrutinised as any other in pop culture. Track Beckham’s life through the tabloids and it’s clear she’s one of those pap magnets who is a permanent target. Is that something she’s been able to ignore with age and wisdom? “I have a lot of PR people I just trust to deal with it,” she says with a tinge of droll resignation. “What you do have to take into consideration is the older you get the older your children get, and they go online and see things that are hurtful, especially when it’s personal stuff. It’s frustrating when things get twisted, because people can make you out to be a real arse. And I don’t like it when it detracts from what I’m actually doing.”
I would imagine being a component of Brand Beckham would constantly invite that situation.
“As in the two of us together, or me and the association with the Spice Girls, it does absolutely,” she agrees, “because then you get the tabloid frenzy and it takes it somewhere else. I had a lunch with the Spice Girls a few months ago to see how everybody was, things spiralled out of control, and I had my lawyer trying to beat down stories that were completely ludicrous. It was a reminder of how awful that was. I work really, really hard and if I’m really proud of what I’ve done and the headlines are something ridiculous. It is frustrating, because it’s not just me, it’s the hard work of a lot of other people.”
Still, time has passed. There aren’t 40 paps following the Beckhams on the school run every morning any longer. “And I think people know me so much more through social media,” she says, “rather than back in the day where they’d see a picture of me walking out of an airport looking miserable. For so many years, people thought I was this miserable stuck-up bitch who thought she was better than anyone, so when you are not that person, it’s quite disarming.”
Disarming. Yes, that’s the word. Arrive with a preconception and Victoria Beckham will strip it away with a smile. I ask her if there was ever a moment in the past 10 years when she felt she’d made it … really, really made it. “I still don’t think the penny has dropped,” she answers. “There have been great moments along the way, winning awards, selling well, but for me, getting success is one thing and maintaining it is something completely different. I’m always head down, focussed, on to the next thing.” She’s still the girl in the bag, fearless, a little insecure and funny as hell.
“For so many years, people thought I was this miserable stuck-up bitch who thought she was better than anyone, so when you are not that person, it’s quite disarming”