Victoria Beckham’s modern designs have allowed women to inhabit different personas from art and film since the brand’s inception 16 years ago. This season’s inspirations, however, are closer to the designer’s heart.
There are few cultural figures in recent memory to metamorphose as completely as Victoria Beckham. As one-fifth of the most successful girl pop group in history, she leaned into the persona of Posh Spice despite her initial reservations (“I can’t say it would’ve been my first choice,” she has commented of the fashionista persona, “but I ultimately grew into it on my own terms”).
Then, she became celebrity gossip fodder in the early noughties as the original WAG’ – a nickname ungenerously given to the wives and girlfriends of soccer players, despite their own accomplishments. Today, she is the critically acclaimed creative director of her eponymous label founded in 2008, most notably awarded Best Designer Brand and Brand of the Year at the British Fashion Council’s Fashion Awards. Like Beckham herself, the woman who wears Victoria Beckham uses polished and elevated sartorial choices to express herself and her imagination – a fact that’s particularly evident with the label’s preSS24 collection.
Described as a continuation of the designer’s “evolving study of the human impulse to dress up in everyday life, the collection derives its inspirations from on-screen representations of effortless elegance – think the plush grittiness of Taxi Driver from 1976, evident in tailored suiting from the straight and pragmatic to boxy and exaggerated, and the feline fluidity of Basic Instinct from 1992, subtly incorporated with considered creases and drapes, emulating a woman in motion though the wearer may be standing still.
“This is a very personal collection to me – it’s about my relationship with both dance and the British countryside.”
Victoria Beckham at her SS24 show
Among the cinematic references are the self-referential; over the decades, Beckham has increasingly embraced the mega-pop star persona and culture icon that preceded her design career, no longer determined to delineate the two. The famous ‘Fashion Stole My Smile’ slogan tee of previous seasons has been replaced with My Dad Had A Rolls-Royce, a playful nod to a viral clip of the designer from the documentary, Beckham.
This, however, is only a pathway to the most personal collection we’ve yet seen from the creative. Revealed at Paris Fashion Week on the historic Rue de l’Université, Beckham drew from the quieter and more serene moments of her larger-than-life experiences for her S$24 collection. “This is a very personal collection to me – it’s about my relationship with both dance and the British countryside,” she said before the show.
Jersey abounded, “humble fabrics from the rehearsal studio”; through to transparent tulle dresses that wouldn’t have looked out of place centre stage. Some of the pieces had internal wiring, “to create an illusion of a gesture or posture”. After all, even without pointe shoes and tutus, you can always spot a dancer by their immaculate stance.
The collection coincides with the release of three fragrances named for significant memories and locations of Beckham’s life. It is, perhaps, the most outward demonstration of the next evolution of the designer and label. Not as a pop star or the ever-polished creative director, but as a person returned to self, with an embracing of the many women embodied before – the final and truest of all transformations.
