Content material warning: This story consists of discussions of consuming issues.
When Netflix dropped its 2023 docuseries “Beckham,” Victoria Beckham stole the present along with her British humor and viral Rolls-Royce second. However the highlight was nonetheless largely her husband’s to relish.
The tables have turned in “Victoria Beckham,” launched Thursday on Netflix. The three-part docuseries — helmed by Nadia Hallgren, who directed “Becoming,” the streamer’s doc about Michelle Obama — follows the U.Okay.’s favourite honorary royal on her journey from awkward theater child to pop icon to style mogul. The documentary is bookended by and structured across the Victoria Beckham Paris Style Week present in 2024.
“It’s not about him,” Victoria says, referencing her legendary footballer husband within the documentary’s opening minutes. “It’s about me.”
Produced by David Beckham’s manufacturing firm, Studio 99, “Victoria Beckham” inevitably paints its eponymous topic in a flattering mild, doubling down on her characterization as an “underdog” from a working-class household. However after listening to, over the course of the docuseries, British broadcasters lambaste Victoria about every little thing from her weight to her naivety, it appears like she’s earned it.
Involved about how a documentary about her is perhaps obtained, Victoria stated she was initially hesitant to conform to the undertaking.
“At first, I said ‘no,’ but then I took a bit of time and I really thought long and hard about it,” the designer stated. “I have been so defined by when I was in the Spice Girls, which was only a four-year period in my life, whereas fashion I’ve been in for coming up to two decades.”
“Up until recently, I was aware I was still fighting the preconceptions because of my previous career and always being mindful of the noise and just focusing on building the [fashion and beauty] brand,” she stated. It was solely not too long ago that she felt that she may share her story with out it reflecting negatively on her enterprise ventures.
Whereas the docuseries dodges controversial subjects like David’s alleged affair, a possible Spice Ladies reunion and the Beckhams’ rumored rift with their son Brooklyn Peltz Beckham — who, not like his three siblings, by no means seems within the movie — and his spouse, Nicola Peltz Beckham, it does nonetheless reveal a lot about Victoria and her fraught relationship along with her Posh Spice persona.
Listed here are seven takeaways from the Netflix docuseries.
Spice Ladies Melanie Chisholm (Sporty Spice), from left, Melanie Brown (Scary Spice), Emma Bunton (Child Spice), Geri Halliwell (Ginger Spice) and Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) pose for a gaggle photograph.
(Netflix)
With the Spice Ladies, Victoria blossomed
As a younger woman rising up in Hertfordshire, England, Victoria didn’t have many pals and her confidence suffered in consequence.
“I was definitely a loner at school,” Victoria stated. “I was bullied. I was awkward. I wasn’t particularly sociable. I just didn’t fit in at all.”
However turning into Posh Spice fully altered how she perceived herself and was a important step towards self-acceptance.
“It was the first time that I ever felt like I belonged. All of a sudden, I was popular,” Victoria stated. “My life would be very different if I hadn’t met those four girls.”
From Posh Spice to WAG
Victoria is commonly credited for creating the phenomenon of WAGs (wives and girlfriends of high-profile athletes).
Shortly after she married David in 1999, the Spice Ladies disbanded, leaving Victoria with out a key side of her identification: “We were like a tornado, and then all of a sudden, it stopped.”
Misplaced with out her pop-star persona, Victoria leaned into the function of supportive spouse. Her public outings consisted of attending Manchester United video games and purchasing for designer garments — at all times in view of paparazzi.
“I look at those pictures and I smile. But when I look back and think, why?” Victoria stated within the documentary. “I suppose there was an element of attention-seeking, if I’m being completely honest. It was at a time when I didn’t feel creatively fulfilled, so it’s how I stayed in the conversation.”
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was trying to find myself,” she stated. “I felt incomplete, sad, frozen in time maybe.”
“I’ve been everything from Porky Posh to Skinny Posh,” Victoria Beckham stated in her Netflix docuseries, launched Thursday.
(Netflix)
Victoria battled an consuming dysfunction
Mere months after giving beginning to Brooklyn in 1999, Victoria was pressured into weighing herself reside on Chris Evans’ present “TFI Friday” so viewers may see whether or not she’d misplaced her “baby weight.” She laughed it off, however the expertise traumatized her.
“I didn’t know what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Was I fat? Was I thin? I don’t know. You lose all sense of reality,” she stated.
Unable to affect what the tabloids stated about her physique, Victoria stated she managed her weight as a substitute: “I was controlling it in an incredibly unhealthy way.”
Victoria stated that she by no means confided in her mother and father about her consuming dysfunction, nor did she ever talk about it publicly. She first opened up about her restrictive weight loss plan and binge consuming in her 2001 autobiography, “Learning to Fly.”
“In the gym, instead of checking my posture or position, I was checking the size of my bottom, or to see if my double chin was getting any smaller,” she writes within the e-book — though she denies having had anorexia.
At first, designers laughed Victoria off
And when her debut assortment bought remarkably good press, she was accused of passing off her mentor Roland Mouret’s designs as her personal.
“Of course, there’s gotta be a man behind it. It couldn’t be like a silly little pop star,” Victoria stated within the documentary.
Victoria, who had been infatuated with style since childhood and had spent a lot of the Spice Ladies’ clothes finances on Gucci attire, refused to surrender so simply. She put her head down and stored working till she earned her friends’ respect.
Anna Wintour is a Victoria Beckham fan
In 2009, Madonna wore a black zippered gown from Victoria Beckham’s debut assortment in a W Journal photoshoot. Two years later, Victoria Beckham gained designer model of the yr on the British Style Awards.
Even Anna Wintour admitted she had misjudged the pop star-turned-luxury designer.
“I think we can all be a bit snobby in the fashion business and think, maybe this is, you know, a side gig,” Wintour stated within the doc. “But Victoria was one that totally proved us wrong.”
Victoria’s enterprise virtually went beneath
Among the many documentary’s most stunning moments is Victoria’s enterprise associate David Belhassen revealing that the designer was spending $70,000 a yr on workplace vegetation. (Plus one other $15,000 yearly for somebody to water them.)
That reality goes a great distance in explaining why Victoria’s model, whereas usually well-regarded, was deep in debt even after years of funding from the designer’s husband.
“We were tens of millions in the red,” Victoria stated.
As soon as David reluctantly closed the financial institution, Victoria was “desperate,” she stated. So she pleaded her case with Belhassen.
Flummoxed by the extent of economic waste and the dire state of affairs Victoria’s model confronted, Belhassen initially resolved to inform Victoria “no.” Then, by likelihood, his spouse wore a Victoria Beckham gown up to now night time; shocked by the standard of the garment, he modified his thoughts.
“[Victoria] was very emotional, and she told me, ‘I won’t let you down,’” Belhassen stated.
Ladies’s Put on Each day reported in August that the model’s income hit $150 million final yr and that it’s now “on track for long-term profitability.”
Posh Spice is previously
Victoria stated within the documentary that she’s going to at all times be thankful for the alternatives the Spice Ladies gave her.
“I have never forgotten where I come from. I’ve never, ever forgotten that Posh Spice is the reason that I’m sitting here now,” she stated.
However she’s additionally recognized because the Return of the Spice Ladies Tour, the legendary woman group’s reunion tour that ran from 2007 to 2008, that her days as Posh Spice are lengthy gone.
“It was during that tour that I realized I didn’t belong on stage. It had been fun, but it wasn’t what I loved anymore,” she stated. Style has been her focus since, and she or he’s nonetheless hungry for fulfillment along with her Victoria Beckham model.
As Victoria tells David within the last moments of the docuseries, “I’m proud and I’m not ashamed to say that I’m ambitious, and I’ve still got a lot that I wanna do.”
“I’m not stopping yet,” she stated.
Victoria and David Beckham stroll the grounds of their Cotswolds, England, property, which is featured closely in “Victoria Beckham.”
(Netflix)
