Naff to national treasure: Victoria Beckham at 50

Lisa Armstrong examines how ‘Posh Spice’ reinvented herself as a fashion designer and beauty mogul

Today, Victoria Caroline Beckham turns 50. The prospect doesn’t faze her – at least not from a superficial point of view. “Honestly,” she told me last autumn, “I’m not obsessed with looking young.” Several years earlier, when she was launching Victoria Beckham Beauty, she said: “I think it looks a bit silly when you can’t move your face. I’m really not bothered about my wrinkles.”

Like many of us, what VB says doesn’t entirely correlate with what she does. The clue is in her multi-hyphenate job title: fashion designer-beauty mogul-celebritysinger. That’s a lot of focus on external appearance.

Back in 1994, the Spice Girls didn’t exactly augur longevity. Of all five Spices, Victoria Adams was arguably the least obviously talented. She’d put in the work, first at the Jason Theatre School in Hertfordshire and then Laine Theatre Arts School in Surrey. But her voice was the most tentative in the group.

Yet her grip on fame has hardly wavered in the past three decades and she possesses a work drive that puts the average Kumon student to shame. While her fellow bandmates largely owe their appeal today to nostalgia, she remains a contemporary figure, thanks to that multi-hyphenate career – witness the capsule collection she’s about to launch for high street chain Mango. Her beauty brand has garnered her a new generation of fans who are barely aware of the Wannabe era.

Much of this requires a singlefocus dedication to being famous. From the early days the Beckhams were notorious in Fleet Street for tipping off the paparazzi about their whereabouts, and they’ve never been reticent about including their children in their many publicity ventures. But if fame’s your goal, then 10 out of 10.

While David Beckham has had some major stumbles – getting sent off in the 1998 World Cup, his alleged desperation for a knighthood and his involvement with Qatar among them – what’s the worst anyone’s ever said about Victoria? That she doesn’t smile? Doesn’t read books? Her brand doesn’t make money? That her “Pob” (Posh bob) was naff? All relatively soft punches in today’s internet boxing ring.

For someone who doesn’t read books (unless you count Vogue), she deftly navigates the cultural tides, from girl power to trans power and culture wars. She came to fame in a pre-smartphone, pre-internet era, but has taken Instagram in her stride (33 million followers and counting), partly poking fun at herself but also, increasingly, dispensing make-up tips, albeit as a means to promote her own brand. She’s been ridiculed but never cancelled; “woman’d” (a new term for when a woman is perpetually roasted by other women à la Keira Knightley circa 2006 or Anne Hathaway from 2010) but never sidelined.

On most counts, she’s handling the public ageing process with more balance and grace than Madonna. Then again, Madonna has always been an outlier, leading the fight against ageism. Beckham, 15 years younger, has the privilege of hitching a smoother ride behind her and looking relatively moderate in the process while championing mini-skirts into her sixth decade. When Beckham wore a slip dress with barely any visible support to her son Brooklyn’s wedding in 2022, rather than a disapproving chorus, most commentators wanted to know where it was from. Her own label, obvs.

Not that any of the issues around ageing have been settled. Women

are still damned if they do “too much” to preserve their looks as much as if they don’t. No one agrees where the line is, because it’s so subjective. In 2022, at the height of fashion’s fleeting embrace of body diversity, Beckham said that “wanting to be really thin was an old-fashioned attitude. I think women today want to look healthy and curvy. As a mother, I loved the fact that Harper [her then 11-year-old daughter] was around women who were really celebrating their curves and enjoying how they look.”

Beckham herself remains rail thin. Some mindsets are hard to shed when it comes to applying them to yourself. In the 1990s she would have been made acutely aware of her size. Already slim, but not “fashion thin”, she lost a dramatic amount of weight between 1998 and 1999. She claimed never to exercise, but she trained as a dancer. Maybe it was just a good line that enabled her to make a joke about hating anything that didn’t allow her to wear heels.

Four years ago, she said that while she used to be wary of lifting weights (perhaps she worried they’d bulk her up), she understands their importance for strengthening bones. Now she works out every day. “I see it like brushing your teeth – it’s just something you do. I normally do an uphill walk on the treadmill, followed by a Tracy Anderson routine.”

She eats ant portions, but of healthy food. “I eat a lot of healthy fats, including avocados and salmon – they’re good for the skin,” she says. “I also love making nut and seed snacks with the kids.”

She’s coy on the subject of cosmetic work, preferring to focus on her double cleansing routine, love of a jade face roller, apple cider vinegar and two cups of black coffee…

It’s almost relatable. As is her upwardly mobile style trajectory. There were the larky years, when she and David dressed in identical black leather onesies, wore matching purple to their wedding and sat on gilt thrones; the epic Wag years of miniscule minis, enormous platforms and sunglasses and whatever statusbag had been featured in Vogue that month.

The “more money than any kind of sense” years rapidly followed, featuring that Pob, with matching fuchsia Birkins and Roland Mouret Galaxy dresses. Posh was having fun.

Then, wham, in 2008 she launched her fashion line, personally presenting to small clusters of sceptical fashion editors in New York. The fake boobs and fuchsia had to go (the one time she has openly discussed cosmetic tweakments is when she admitted to having her breast implants removed).

Enter the “back to brunette” years. In came smoky Peter Lindbergh eyes and an ever sharper awareness of the aesthetics “fashion people”, as opposed to celebrities, admired. She’s never prickly when reminded of previous fashion misdemeanours. “I’m not so sure about those PVC catsuits,” she said in 2017. “It was good at the time and it’s made me who I am. But I’m much more secure in myself now, at my age, where I am, with my family and my career, and I think you can see that in the way I dress.”

As for her fashion line, which the schadenfreude brigade love to frame as a massive drain on David’s finances (ignoring the fact that she’s probably able to fund any losses herself, together with external backers), it’s still going after 16 years, which is more than can be said for Lily Allen’s collaboration with New Look, Rihanna’s with LVMH, J Lo’s… The list goes on. Making money out of fashion isn’t easy.

Just how much money VB makes is a moot point. Last autumn, the brand declared it was in profit for the first time. Some dispute this. Be that as it may, she’s on the catwalk schedule in Paris, the fashion show capital of the world attended by senior press, including Anna Wintour. Having faced down almost universal scepticism at the start of her fashion career, she’s a testament to the efficacy of working hard and remaining approachable.

There’s serious buzz around her VB beauty line, with one of her cult kajal pencils sold every 30 seconds – unlike the tumbleweed fluttering around J Lo’s beauty products, which a Reddit user reported last year were literally gathering dust in Sephora.

The way she’s navigated her fame beyond its expected sell-by date and used it as a springboard into other careers is another reason she resonates – it’s the triumph of the striver. The closeness of the Beckhams with their four children – and reported feuds with their eldest son Brooklyn and his wife Nicola Peltz Beckham – is another source of fascination.

Brooklyn’s parents seem to be handling alleged tensions with their customary tactics – namely keeping calm, at least on the surface, and carrying on posing for the cameras.

Which brings us to last year’s hit Netflix “documentary”/ hagiography which nicely played up his ribbing of her, her deadpan retaliations and probably did more to reposition VB in the nation’s affections than anything else she has done.

In 2008 she launched her fashion line and the fake boobs and fuchsia had to go