How Victoria pulled off a rebranding many stars would envy

Katie Rosseinsky, The Independent

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 Guacci 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.