How Victoria has done what Meghan Markle never could

There’s a moment in Victoria Beckham, Netflix’s new three-part documentary, where David and Victoria are having a heart-to-heart in a cabin overlooking their manmade lake at their £12m Cotswolds mansion. “Don’t you feel confident enough that you can sit back and relax?” he asks, rather tenderly. “What is stopping you from saying, ‘Okay, I’ve achieved it’? Who are you trying to prove this to?” As her voice cracks with emotion, VB responds, “Maybe a lot of it is to you.” He shrugs and says, “You could make a cheese sandwich and we’d be proud of you.” She replies, both with tears and laughter: “Let’s be honest, I couldn’t actually make a cheese sandwich very well.”

This, you see, is Brand Beckham 2.0 — the power couple’s Kardashified reinvention. Borrowing the Kardashians’ “at home with” format, we’re presented with a tight family unit, living between its various mega mansions around the world — London, Miami, Oxfordshire and Dubai. Victoria Beckham is the companion series to Netflix’s 2023 Beckham documentary (for which they’ve reportedly made £20m in total) and it’s understood that the Beckhams were given full editorial control.

With VB dishing out endless PDSs (public displays of affection) upon David, there are of course, moments that feel performative, designed to distract from any, ahem, current disharmony with their eldest. But there are also plenty of signs that suggest this celebrity dynasty could actually be human too — there’s Harper ticking off VB for messing up their TikTok dance routine, David shaking his head and walking away from another one of Victoria’s stories.

It won’t have escaped your attention that Meghan Markle has also flung open her very grand doors to Netflix again, with her second series of With Love, Meghan, released in August. Because, as both VB and MM know only too well, if you want to reach new audiences, you’ve got to show “real life” behind the scenes. At home, notes the celebrity PR Mark Borkowski, “is where they feel comfortable. Look at the success of Hello! and OK! — that’s how they managed to get those talks over the line. So it’s, ‘Take a look at my glossy kitchen!’” Just as with Hello! And OK!, celebrities can insist on content approval, but here, adds Borkowski, they can enjoy “bigger audiences”.

The similarities between Victoria and Meghan don’t end with the Netflix series. Both women are confessed “control freaks”, and they are branching out into merch, which they need to shift. Meghan with her beverage and entertaining products (flower sprinkles, anyone?), VB with her fashion and beauty lines, both women know that (in theory at least), by role-modelling their fabulous lifestyles — the immaculate veg patches, the professional kitchens, the status socialising — we may be persuaded that we really want to be like them and therefore will happily buy into them.

Both have also been in Paris this month for fashion week — but where VB now commands the hard-earned respect from everyone from Anna Wintour downwards, Markle only saw her epic fails go viral, including what’s been dubbed her Zoolander walk as she strutted into a fashion show, being accused of laughing at a stumbling model, and an awkward mingling with Balenciaga’s Pierpaolo Piccioli. The tone-deaf limo reel, filmed close to where Diana died, further cemented the feeling of Meghan Markle’s overwhelming self-absorption.

There are other key differences, not least in their deployment of that key publicity strategy, vulnerability. After receiving criticism for glossing over David’s alleged affair with Rebecca Loos in Beckham, it feels like the Beckhams have upped the vulnerability quotient for this series. We see Victoria Beckham admit to having an eating disorder for the very first time, as well as opening up about her label being tens of millions of pounds in the red, being bullied and uncool at school, and enduring decades of media vitriol. (It is, of course, a highly curated version of vulnerability — still no word on the alleged rift with her eldest son, for example.)