Posh Spice’s three-part film glosses over the gossip to focus solely on her Paris Fashion Week show
When David Beckham released his Netflix documentary, Beckham, two years ago, he was overshadowed by his wife. Victoria – former Spice Girl turned fashion designer – presented as not just a wingwoman to David, standing by him through media storms and extra-marital affairs, but entertaining in her own right. It was she who created the series’ viral moment too, playing up her working-class roots as David reminds her that she used to be driven to school in a Rolls-Royce.
It’s little wonder the same production team has made another documentary series about her. Yet Victoria Beckham isn’t the warts-and-all, revelation-filled film that I hoped for. Instead, it’s a fashion documentary, mostly about Beckham’s stressful build-up to her Paris show last September. This isn’t a series about Beckham the person – it’s about Beckham the business.
Mercifully, the three episodes are rather light on the history lessons. Beckham’s time as a pop star has been well documented, and her marriage to the former England football player was raked over extensively in his own series. We do get insight into her childhood, in which those “working-class roots” are hinted at – “my dad started with nothing,” she says, remembering how he (an electrical wholesaler) would have his children wiring up products at the kitchen table.
Grainy disposable camera photos show Beckham – then Victoria Adams – as a young girl, dressed up and on stage at the theatre school her parents remortgaged the house to send her to. She knows how much they wanted her to succeed, she says, and she knew she had to live up to the gift they had given her. But she was not happy – her teachers criticised her weight and always put her to the back of the stage. It was there that she developed the eating disorder that would rear its head again when the press attacked her.
That Beckham had an eating disorder won’t surprise anyone who saw her fragile frame plastered across the tabloids in the late noughties, and the topic is glossed over without much attention in the documentary. As is her relationship with the other Spice Girls. “Don’t forget where you came from,” she recalls Melanie B saying to her a few years ago, to which she replied: “I’ve never forgotten where I came from”.
Despite repeatedly telling the cameras how much she loved performing as a child, the first Spice Girls reunion in 2007 cemented the fact that she didn’t want to be on the stage – instead, her calling is fashion.
But the average viewer won’t care about the Paris fashion show we’re given behind-the-scenes access to, and it makes for rather dull viewing. Donatella Versace, Tom Ford, Anna Wintour and Juergen Teller are all impressive names to have as interviewees, but they can’t tell us anything about Beckham beyond her public-facing fashion persona.
We are told time and time again that putting on a fashion show is chaotic and stressful, but Beckham wears her usual steely expression throughout. She blames her lack of smiles on her nervousness in front of a camera. “I just can’t do it,” she says.
Perhaps that’s why Victoria Beckham is so dry. There are glimmers of that famous but elusive sense of humour, poking fun at her own reputation: refusing a Wispa from David, she says: “I haven’t touched chocolate since the 90s – I’m not going to start now.” There are tears when she talks about the stress of almost losing her business to debt and having to repeatedly ask David to bail her out. But otherwise, Beckham has her game face on.
If there’s one thing she wants us to take away, it’s that she wants to be taken seriously. But if she was once underestimated as a frivolous ex-pop star, Victoria Beckham shows that she’s now gone too far the other way. It’s a bland, joyless watch.
‘Victoria Beckham’ is streaming on Netflix
