Victoria Beckham sheds Posh persona, gets candid about eating disorder in Netflix doc
- Share via
Content warning: This story includes discussions of eating disorders.
When Netflix dropped its 2023 docuseries “Beckham,” Victoria Beckham stole the show with her British humor and viral Rolls-Royce moment. But the spotlight was still largely her husband’s to relish.
The tables have turned in “Victoria Beckham,” released Thursday on Netflix. The three-part docuseries — helmed by Nadia Hallgren, who directed “Becoming,” the streamer’s doc about Michelle Obama — follows the U.K.’s favorite honorary royal on her journey from awkward theater kid to pop icon to fashion mogul. The documentary is bookended by and structured around the Victoria Beckham Paris Fashion Week show in 2024.
“It’s not about him,” Victoria says, referencing her legendary footballer husband in the documentary’s opening minutes. “It’s about me.”
David Beckham got in line with thousands of others before dawn Friday to pay his respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II. There were snacks.
Produced by David Beckham’s production company, Studio 99, “Victoria Beckham” inevitably paints its eponymous subject in a flattering light, doubling down on her characterization as an “underdog” from a working-class family. But after hearing, over the course of the docuseries, British broadcasters lambaste Victoria about everything from her weight to her naivety, it feels like she’s earned it.
Concerned about how a documentary about her might be received, Victoria said she was initially hesitant to agree to the project.
“At first, I said ‘no,’ but then I took a bit of time and I really thought long and hard about it,” the designer said. “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 said. It was only recently that she felt that she could share her story without it reflecting negatively on her business ventures.
Victoria Beckham may have moved her family back to London, but a big part of her heart is still in Los Angeles.
While the docuseries dodges controversial topics like David’s alleged affair, a potential Spice Girls reunion and the Beckhams’ rumored rift with their son Brooklyn Peltz Beckham — who, unlike his three siblings, never appears in the film — and his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham, it does still reveal much about Victoria and her fraught relationship with her Posh Spice persona.
Here are seven takeaways from the Netflix docuseries.
With the Spice Girls, Victoria blossomed
As a young girl growing up in Hertfordshire, England, Victoria didn’t have many friends and her confidence suffered as a result.
“I was definitely a loner at school,” Victoria said. “I was bullied. I was awkward. I wasn’t particularly sociable. I just didn’t fit in at all.”
But becoming Posh Spice completely altered how she perceived herself and was a critical step toward self-acceptance.
“It was the first time that I ever felt like I belonged. All of a sudden, I was popular,” Victoria said. “My life would be very different if I hadn’t met those four girls.”
From Posh Spice to WAG
Victoria is often credited for creating the phenomenon of WAGs (wives and girlfriends of high-profile athletes).
Shortly after she married David in 1999, the Spice Girls disbanded, leaving Victoria without a key aspect of her identity: “We were like a tornado, and then all of a sudden, it stopped.”
Former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell-Horner discusses her new book, ‘Rosie Frost: Ice on Fire,’ and teases how the trilogy will end.
Lost without her pop-star persona, Victoria leaned into the role of supportive wife. Her public outings consisted of attending Manchester United games and shopping for designer clothes — always in view of paparazzi.
“I look at those pictures and I smile. But when I look back and think, why?” Victoria said in 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 said. “I felt incomplete, sad, frozen in time maybe.”
Victoria battled an eating disorder
Mere months after giving birth to Brooklyn in 1999, Victoria was pressured into weighing herself live on Chris Evans’ show “TFI Friday” so viewers could see whether she’d lost her “baby weight.” She laughed it off, but the experience 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 said.
Unable to influence what the tabloids said about her body, Victoria said she controlled her weight instead: “I was controlling it in an incredibly unhealthy way.”
Victoria said that she never confided in her parents about her eating disorder, nor did she ever speak about it publicly. She first opened up about her restrictive diet and binge eating 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 in the book — although she denies having had anorexia.
Record waits and Byzantine rules stymie California’s poorest patients amid a surge in eating disorders that began early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
At first, designers laughed Victoria off
Following the Beckhams’ move across the pond to California, Victoria decided to seriously pursue her dream of working in the fashion industry. When news broke of her career pivot, designers were skeptical.
And when her debut collection got remarkably good press, she was accused of passing off her mentor Roland Mouret’s designs as her own.
“Of course, there’s gotta be a man behind it. It couldn’t be like a silly little pop star,” Victoria said in the documentary.
Victoria, who had been infatuated with fashion since childhood and had spent most of the Spice Girls’ clothing budget on Gucci dresses, refused to give up so easily. She put her head down and kept working until she earned her peers’ respect.
Anna Wintour is a Victoria Beckham fan
In 2009, Madonna wore a black zippered dress from Victoria Beckham’s debut collection in a W Magazine photoshoot. Two years later, Victoria Beckham won designer brand of the year at the British Fashion Awards.
Even Anna Wintour admitted she had misjudged the pop star-turned-luxury designer.
Finally! Anna Wintour gives ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ and Meryl Streep high praise 19 years after the release of the movie, which was inspired by the Vogue icon.
“I think we can all be a bit snobby in the fashion business and think, maybe this is, you know, a side gig,” Wintour said in the doc. “But Victoria was one that totally proved us wrong.”
Victoria’s business almost went under
Among the documentary’s most shocking moments is Victoria’s business partner David Belhassen revealing that the designer was spending $70,000 a year on office plants. (Plus another $15,000 annually for someone to water them.)
That fact goes a long way in explaining why Victoria’s brand, while generally well-regarded, was deep in debt even after years of investment from the designer’s husband.
“We were tens of millions in the red,” Victoria said.
Once David reluctantly closed the bank, Victoria was “desperate,” she said. So she pleaded her case with Belhassen.
Flummoxed by the level of financial waste and the dire situation Victoria’s brand faced, Belhassen initially resolved to tell Victoria “no.” Then, by chance, his wife wore a Victoria Beckham dress to date night; stunned by the quality of the garment, he changed his mind.
“[Victoria] was very emotional, and she told me, ‘I won’t let you down,’” Belhassen said.
Women’s Wear Daily reported in August that the brand’s revenue hit $150 million last year and that it is now “on track for long-term profitability.”
Posh Spice is in the past
Victoria said in the documentary that she will always be grateful for the opportunities the Spice Girls 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 said.
Part of a wave of films and TV series reconsidering the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, “Girls5eva” is humorously skeptical of our nostalgia for the era’s pop music.
But she’s also known since the Return of the Spice Girls Tour, the legendary girl group’s reunion tour that ran from 2007 to 2008, that her days as Posh Spice are long 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 said. Fashion has been her focus since, and she’s still hungry for success with her Victoria Beckham brand.
As Victoria tells David in the final 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 said.
