Victoria Beckham: Is She for Real?

Robert Fairer for The New York Times
Victoria Beckham, in her London studio, where she connects the dots for her clothing line.

By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: September 3, 2010

London

VICTORIA BECKHAM talks the talk. Guiding a visitor through her fall 2010 collection, spread on a rack in her studio in Battersea, she draws out a dress recently worn by Cameron Diaz, identifying its fabric authoritatively as a metallic jacquard. Another, shapely and lavishly draped, is underpinned by domette wadding, she says, to hold its folds in place. Still another, crisp as corn flakes, was made of gazar. “Gazar, I love it,” Ms. Beckham murmurs, savoring the term like a vintage Bordeaux.

A quick study, she has mastered the argot of the cutting room with the same alacrity that has marked all her most ardent pursuits — the voice and music lessons that laid the foundations for her career as the pop idol known as Posh Spice; her marriage to the British soccer star David Beckham, an exercise in family branding; her wardrobe, engineered to show off her whippet frame and improbably lusty chest.

“I don’t do anything by halves,” she says, an edge in her voice. “If you’re going to do something, do it properly, I think. Otherwise there is no point in doing it at all.”

That resolve has paid off handsomely. In recent months Ms. Beckham, she of the contorted public poses, racy aphorisms and fleeting television career, has emerged as an industry force, the wily maverick of New York Fashion Week.

Written off not so long ago as a pneumatic Barbie of the hinterlands, Ms. Beckham has been a fixture in the front row at presentations like those of Chanel and Marc Jacobs. Her sinuously curvy cocktail dresses have been worn by Jennifer Lopez, Drew Barrymore and Ms. Diaz and are showcased in stores alongside luxury labels like Narciso Rodriguez and Vera Wang. “Don’t underestimate her,” said Anna Wintour, among the many editors and retailers who have embraced her, pointing out that Ms. Beckham has managed, in a scant four seasons, to shed her dubious standing as the girl least likely to succeed.

“She’s growing up,” said Ken Downing, the fashion director of Neiman Marcus, and an early advocate of Ms. Beckham’s designs. “Her knowledge of dressmaking is impressive. She understands how to bring out the best in the female form, and that’s one reason our clients are drawn to what she does.” As important, he said, “She knows how good clothes feel when they’re on. Because she has worn them.”

Good clothes are necessary adjunct to a life spent basking in the public eye. Ms. Beckham has cavorted for the camera in the Mediterranean-style villa in Beverly Hills, Calif., that she shares with her husband, a home filled with art by Damien Hirst, Sam Taylor-Wood and Tracey Emin. She has sashayed along fashion runways, modeled in high-profile advertising campaigns and appeared as a guest on television shows like “Ugly Betty” “Project Runway” and “American Idol.”

Her life — the feverishly documented spending sprees, the star turns on the red carpet, the clamor for her designs — may be enviable, but she wants you to know it has left her unspoiled. “Doing diva,” she said in London in June, “that’s completely pointless.”

INSIDERS powerful enough to score an invitation to her intimate spring 2011 showing next Sunday in a town house on East 63rd Street may well take her at her word. They will be greeted by a woman aglow in, though not overtly dazzled by, her own success, one who serves as the commentator for her shows — confessing, rather disarmingly, her relative ignorance. “Look, it’s a very basic way that I am doing this,” she said last season. “Technically, it’s probably not the right way.”

Her dresses, once so corseted that they gave off a whiff of kitsch, are loosening up, exuding at times a patrician breeziness. Whisking a visitor around her London headquarters, she said: “My style has relaxed a bit. I think you will see that in this next collection.”

You will also see a self-assured creature whose angular features have grown softer and more womanly, her turnout a departure from the constricting get-ups that once were her fashion signature.

Diamond studs wink in her ears and a pink gold Rolex gleams on her wrist — but these are discrete compared with the rhinestone studded hipster jeans she flaunted in New York only a handful of years ago.

The brief skirt she wore for her interview was demurely balanced by a cropped Alaïa cardigan that revealed nothing more brazen than a line of Hebrew scripture tattooed at the base of her neck: “I am my lover’s and my lover is mine,” meant to cement her marriage bond, which has survived numerous allegations of Mr. Beckham’s infidelities. Through it all — the up-and-down marriage, the abortive singing career, the storming of fashion’s citadel and the occasional misstep, including the failure of an earlier denim line — Ms. Beckham has proved a deft architect of her own ascent.

One part inspiration, three parts aspiration, she is quick to disclose the great source of her drive. “I am a control freak,” she said calmly in her studio. No Ghesquiere or Galliano, she does not claim to be an innovator. “She takes conventional dresses and makes them stand out,” said Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue. But a dedication to perfection has played a significant part in the advancement of her fashion career.

Yet Ms. Beckham, by her own account, is a wobbly work in progress. “I’m very aware that I’m working my way up the ladder,” she said. “I have a long, long way to go.”

With her business partner, Simon Fuller, the creator of “American Idol,” she presides over a luxury brand encompassing dresses, denim, sunglasses and now a line of handbags that will make its debut on the runway next week. Her dresses, built on a contour-perfecting inner scaffolding, are magnets to the well-heeled clients ready to pay for a Grecian draped tunic or urn-shaped cocktail dress. Their growing allegiance has contributed to sales in excess of $7 million last year, said Zach Duane, the company’s senior vice president for business development, a figure that would hold steady through this year as well.

Not so impressive, perhaps, by the standards of industry behemoths who tally their sales in the billions of dollars. But Ms. Beckham envisions a measured growth for her brand. “We are moving in baby steps,” she said of the line, mostly financed at the outset with the proceeds — under $1 million — from the sales of the Beckhams’ successful fragrance line.

The collection is tightly distributed; the dresses are made in England and carried in 20 stores around the world. New denim and eyewear collections are being sold in 100 stores, Mr. Duane said, and free-standing Victoria Beckham boutiques are in the offing.

Ms. Beckham, he indicated, can take much of the credit for the label’s success. “She is incredibly involved in pricing, wanting to know where we’re at in terms of turnover, and how the costs are being managed,” he said. “She is fully aware that this is the only way that you can properly run a business.”

She is certainly integral to the design process, draping her dresses on herself. “I might get a piece of fabric and tie it around me, then ask an assistant to pin it for me,” she said. “I’m not claiming to be a master draper. The bottom line is: Would I wear this?”

Her beaver-ish attentiveness to the fit, construction and marketing of her line has just won her a British Fashion Council nomination as Designer Brand of the Year. It has also secured her enviable retail real estate. At Bergdorf Goodman, her dresses, which sell from roughly $1,500 to $3,700, “are among the highest sell-through performers,” said Jim Gold, chief executive of the store. What’s more, there is a wait list. “It’s not unusual for a dress to be reserved two or three deep,” he said.

She may like the taste of victory. But Ms. Beckham is still fending off critics from inside an armor of self-deprecation. “I’m so camp, such a gay man trying to get out,” she likes to say. And, “It’s exhausting being fabulous.”

Her sauciness has endeared her to no less a cultural arbiter than Marc Jacobs, who befriended Ms. Beckham and featured her in an ad campaign, in which she allowed herself to be photographed upended, her legs projecting from a shopping bag and waving in the air. Mr. Jacobs’s public embrace went some way toward redeeming her in the eyes of the fashion cognoscenti.

Yet she is still being held to the coals by some insiders who tagged her from the beginning as an upstart, just another in long line of pop confections to brand her initials on someone else’s frocks. Skepticism has dogged her since she announced her intention to create her fashion label.

“There is always a certain amount of bias involved when you have a name as big as hers,” acknowledged Holli Rogers, the buying director for Net-a-Porter, now Ms. Beckham’s biggest global client. The Web-based company picked up her line in its first season, but not without “a lot of deliberation,” Ms. Rogers recalled. “We had to take into consideration, ‘Is this a marketable brand for our level of customer?’ ”

In February, the New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn dismissed Ms. Beckham’s fall collection as a succession of “ladylike vamp dresses straight from the movies. I could see them on TCM any old time.”

The barbs sting, Ms. Beckham acknowledged, but not enough to deflect her from her purpose. “I want to build something that’s very respected,” she said with a pleading urgency. Her career, she added, “is about getting things right. I want to make sure I’m in this position in 20 years’ time.”

You believe her, even feel for her. Still, it’s tough to forget that Ms. Beckham is a skilled performer, balancing a calculated raciness with a great show of decorum and humility. For the space of a morning she held her runaway tongue in check, sparing the salty commentary that has seasoned past conversations. “You have to go to a sex shop to get this spray to polish them,” she once said of a pair of thigh-high PVC boots she wore for a Macy’s appearance. More than once she has boasted about the size of her husband’s penis.

But holding forth at her London studio, she dabbed at the corners of her mouth, perching or alternately rocking on the edge of her chair like a schoolgirl in a scratchy pinafore — her propriety evidently conceived to disarm the greatest cynics.

Ed Burstell, who first encountered Ms. Beckham a couple of years ago, during his tenure as a top executive at Bergdorf Goodman, relished her sales pitch, describing it as girly and unscripted. Ms. Beckham had approached him as an artless supplicant, he recalled, alighting in his boardroom to show off her new line of sunglasses.

“She had all the frames in a plastic bag,” said Mr. Burstell, who is now the managing director for Liberty in London, adding with a hoot, “She pulled some of them out and was modeling some of the frames for me, really getting into it, really working it. She was funny, but at the same time relentless.”

Ms. Beckham’s persistence is ingrained. “Nothing has ever come easy to me,” she said wryly. “At school I was never the brightest child. I had to work really hard.” Acutely aware of her shortcomings, she can be her own toughest critic. “I’m no Mariah Carey,” she said of her time as a Spice Girl. As a designer, she thinks of herself as still being in a formative stage, her style sense as fungible as her public persona. Why not? “I find it really boring when people are afraid to change,” she said.

Her metamorphosis seems well in keeping with her ever-mutating aims. What motivates her? “You have to think that she doesn’t want to be eclipsed by her husband,” Mr. Burstell said, an observation she would be unlikely to challenge.

The label of WAG, a British acronym reserved for the brassily acquisitive wives and girlfriends of soccer players, seems to leave her unfazed. “I was probably responsible for creating that look,” Ms. Beckham said, “the long hair extensions, the fake tan, lots of makeup.” But unlike her presumptive peers, “I’ve never really been a true WAG,” she said quickly. “I’ve always had a career.”

There are still great gaps in her catalog of accomplishments. “I would love to be Lady Beckham,” she once joshed in a radio interview. But you suspect that her remarks are only half in jest.

“You can’t buy class,” she said. But a string of good works may not hurt. “I grew up obviously admiring Lady Diana’s style, the amount that she gave, the charities,” she said. The Beckhams have helped raise millions in support of cancer research and children’s education. The Victoria and David Beckham Charitable Trust serves children in need, providing wheelchairs, prosthetics and other forms of assistance.

As revealing is her guest list for an imaginary dinner party, not just the predictably aristocratic likes of Grace Kelly and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but also contemporary idols like Cate Blanchett; Tilda Swinton; Carine Roitfeld, the editor of French Vogue; and, oh, yes, Michelle Obama. “I really would love to dress her,” Ms. Beckham said almost plaintively.

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images; Jason Merritt/Getty Images; Kevin Winter/Getty Images; Craig Barritt/Getty Images
From left, Courtney Cox, Mary J. Blige, Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz are some of the notables who have worn the designs of Ms. Beckham, who now lives among them in Southern California.


For all her ambition, Ms. Beckham is not ready to slough off the last remnants of her working-class past. In the 1980s, her father, an electrical distributor, celebrated his own success by trading up from a van to a shiny Rolls-Royce and dropping her off at school in it. Ms. Beckham was mortified. “Daddy,” she remembered begging him, “can we please go in the van?”

“I just wanted to fit in,” she recalled, cringing at the memory.

She takes pride just the same in being her father’s daughter, self-made to the core, the product of an unwavering optimism. She is aware her career isn’t bulletproof. At least not yet. It was built, after all, on “not taking ‘no’ for an answer.”

“My whole life has been that way,” she said. “I’ve always enjoyed proving people wrong.”