Life> Celebrities

Victoria Beckham's fresh spice

By Ruth La Ferla (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-12 09:34

 

Posh Spice Victoria has successfully transformed from girl-band member to soccer wife to fashion icon and designer of her own collection. Provided to China Daily

The former pop idol, celebrity soccer wife and occasional model solidifies her credentials in her latest incarnation as a fashion designer

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," 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 Beckham has emerged as an industry force, the wily maverick of New York Fashion Week.

Written off not so long ago, Beckham has been a fixture in the front row at presentations such as those of Chanel and Marc Jacobs. Her sinuously curvy cocktail dresses have been worn by Jennifer Lopez, Drew Barrymore and Diaz and are showcased in stores alongside luxury labels such as Narciso Rodriguez and Vera Wang.

"Don't underestimate her," said Anna Wintour, among the many editors and retailers who have embraced her, adding that 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 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."

Good clothes are a necessary part of a life spent basking in the public eye. 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 from fashion runways to high-profile advertising campaigns and appeared on TV shows, including Ugly Betty 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 this month may well take her at her word. She is a woman aglow in, although 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 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 a few years ago.

The brief skirt she wore for her interview was demurely balanced by a cropped Alaia 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 David Beckham's infidelities. Through it all Beckham has proved a deft architect of her own ascent.

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 Beckham, by her own account, is a wobbly work in progress.

"I'm 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 debuted on the runway last week. Her dresses are magnets for well-heeled clients. 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 will likely hold steady through this year as well.

Not so impressive, perhaps, by the standards of high profile fashion companies that tally their sales in the billions of dollars. But 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 - less than $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, Duane said, and freestanding Victoria Beckham boutiques are in the offing.

Her 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. But "I'm not claiming to be a master draper," she says. "The bottom line is: Would I wear this?"

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

Yet she is still being held to the coals by some insiders who tagged her from the beginning as an upstart, just another in a long line of pop confections to brand her initials on someone else's frocks.

In February New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn dismissed Beckham's fall collection as a succession of "ladylike vamp dresses straight from the movies."

The barbs sting, Beckham acknowledged, but not enough to deflect her from her purpose. "I want to build something that's respected," she said Her career, she added, "is about getting things right. I want to make sure I'm in this position in 20 years' time."

The New York Times