USA TODAY National
The world met Victoria Beckham in the mid-90s as Victoria Adams, aka Posh Spice, the chicest member of pop megagroup the Spice Girls. But as Netflix’s new docuseries reveals, beneath the tight Gucci dress was a young woman desperate to fit in, to be loved.
“It makes me quite emotional because you’re always trying to prove yourself to people,” soccer legend David Beckham tells his wife of 26 years in her three-part docuseries, “Victoria Beckham.” “What is stopping you from just saying, ‘OK, I’ve achieved it’?”
“Success, it feels good. I’m not going to lie,” replies mom-of-four Victoria, 51, who transitioned from pop star to fashion designer in the late aughts. “I’m proud, and I’m not ashamed to say that I’m ambitious, and I’ve still got a lot that I want to do.”
“Victoria Beckham,” directed by Nadia Hallgren (“Becoming”), includes a behind-the-scenes look at her September 2024 show for Paris Fashion Week, the biggest of her career. "It's "the toughest city," Beckham says, "with the toughest critics, amongst the biggest fashion houses in the industry."
Here are the biggest revelations from the docuseries.
She was bullied in school
Beckham describes herself as “a loner” growing up in Goffs Oak, about 30 miles outside London.
“I was bullied. I was awkward. I wasn’t particularly sociable,” she says. “I just didn’t fit in, at all.”
Performing in school plays and dancing offered an escape.
“I didn’t really want to be me,” she says. “I didn’t like me. I desperately wanted to be liked.”
In 1994 Beckham auditioned for a girl group in London, as did future bandmates Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Melanie Chisholm and Geri Halliwell among 400 hopefuls, according to the BBC. Joining the Spice Girls was "the first time that I ever felt that I belonged,” Beckham says. “I remember the girls saying to me, ‘You’re funny. It’s OK. Be who you are.’”
It’s a message she now relays to her youngest child and only daughter, 14-year-old Harper: “I tell Harper every single day, ‘You follow your dreams and be who you are.’”
An eating disorder provided the illusion of control
After enrolling in theater school, "I started getting a lot of criticism about my appearance, my weight,” she says.
Her mother, Jackie Adams, remembers Beckham being told she’d be in the back of dance routines because she was “overweight.”
Years later, when the Spice Girls became a global phenomenon, the media would join in scrutinizing Beckham’s size, alternately describing her as ”podgy Posh” or looking “sick.”
“I didn’t know what I saw when I looked in the mirror,” she says. “Was I fat? Was I thin? I don’t know. You lose all sense of reality. I was just very critical of myself. I didn’t like what I saw.”
“I had no control over what was being written about me, pictures that were being taken, and I suppose I wanted to control that,” she adds. “I could control it with the clothing. I could control my weight, and I was controlling it in an incredibly unhealthy way. When you have an eating disorder, you become very good at lying.”
“It really affects you when you’re being told constantly you’re not good enough,” she says, “and I suppose that’s been with me my whole life.”
During the Spice Girls reunion, she ‘realized I didn’t belong onstage’
When the Spice Girls proposed reuniting for a tour (2007-08), Beckham relented after her husband "mum-guilted me."
“Our kids weren’t around to see their mum be a Spice Girl,” he reasons.
The band split in 2001, and the pair’s eldest, Brooklyn, was born in 1999.
“It was good to celebrate the Spice Girls, but it was during that tour that I realized I didn’t belong onstage,” Beckham says. “It had been fun, but it wasn’t what I loved anymore.” She had her sights set on the fashion industry.
“One of the girls actually said to me, and it did upset me not too long ago, actually − it was Melanie B who said to me, ‘Don’t forget where you’ve come from,’” Beckham says. “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.”
Her foray into fashion was bumpy
Beckham became interested in fashion during the Spice Girls’ reign. She used the majority of the group’s styling budget on herself, as “The other girls weren’t really into fashion,” she says. Beckham took that money to Gucci and purchased her first designer items.
“If you do put on the perfect dress and it does make you feel a certain way, that confidence, that feeling was something I wasn’t used to,” she says. “Fashion became everything.”
But Beckham’s enthusiasm didn’t earn her industry cred. In 2008, she starred in a Marc Jacobs campaign photographed by Juergen Teller, in which she was overly tan, crawling out of a Marc Jacobs bag and scowling.
“When I first saw those pictures, I was horrified,” she says. “It was very much poking fun at me. And that’s when I realized I was a laughingstock. No one took me seriously in this industry.”
French designer Roland Mouret began mentoring Beckham, and she launched her eponymous brand in 2008 with a 10-dress collection. But by 2016, the company’s expenditure eclipsed its sales.
“We were tens of millions in the red,” Beckham says.
The losses "panicked" David, who had invested in the company and "never saw anything coming back."
David Belhassen, founder of NEO Investment Partners, partnered with Beckham and began slicing the budget, which included an astronomical allotment for office plants.
“It was costing, like, 70 thousand a year,” Belhassen says. “And then there was someone who was coming to water the plants for 15 thousand a year.”
Brooklyn Beckham and his wife make a (very) brief appearance
For those wondering if the rumored rift with eldest son Brooklyn and his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham, is addressed, it isn't. But a glimpse of the couple is shown on the night of the Paris show. Brooklyn also pops up fleetingly in a flashback with his brother Romeo at the aforementioned Spice Girls show.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Victoria Beckham discusses eating disorder in docuseries: 'I didn’t like what I saw'
Reporting by Erin Jensen, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
Reuters US Domestic
America News
Raw Story
Cover Media
VARIETY
TODAY Pop Culture
RadarOnline
She Knows