The word “control” comes up a lot in Victoria Beckham’s self-commissioned three-part documentary Victoria Beckham. So much of her life has been out of her control – the tumble from pop star to Wag, shipped out to Madrid at a week’s notice; the savage tabloid headlines, the vile TV hosts; struggling to be heard above the fray.
If this documentary was an attempt to reclaim that control, it is far too effective in its aim. Victoria Beckham is, much like its subject, tasteful, well put together, restrained – and so tightly controlled and sanitised that it reveals almost nothing. Its most candid disclosure – that she developed an eating disorder, in part a result of Noughties body shaming, in part an attempt to regain some control – is both unsurprising (she was weighed on national television mere months after the birth of her first child) and wildly unexplored. Her husband’s alleged affair with Rebecca Loos, skated over in the 2023 doc Beckham, passes unmentioned altogether.
The Beckhams have, since the moment baby Brooklyn was pictured in that purple cowboy hat at their wedding reception, been a family firm. Once, that meant selling pregnancy announcements to OK! Magazine; today it means slickly documenting family gatherings for Condé Nast via Instagram. Victoria credits her family with getting her through the tough times: “I think it’s having such a strong family unit that always used to help me get through those things.” It is spectacularly bad timing, then, that this documentary has been released at the moment a family feud is tearing a hole in brand Beckham. The falling out with Brooklyn Beckham and his gazillionaire wife Nicola Peltz is simply not mentioned; Brooklyn, conspicuously, is almost entirely absent compared to the other three children. Not a single difficult question is asked.
Here is Victoria Beckham’s life according to Victoria Beckham. First, at school, she was uncool, awkward, bullied. She loved to dance and dress up – “I used to enjoy the sense of escapism. You become someone else” – and dreamed of going to performing arts school. In the Nineties, the Spice Girls helped her discover her confidence and her sense of fun; she preached “girl power” and discovered it for herself, too. During this time Posh Spice met and married David “Golden Balls” Beckham, becoming one half of the most papped couple in the world.
Then, the group disbanded and she struggled to adjust to her new reality – no longer a pop star, just a wife in a flat in Manchester. “People thought I was that miserable cow that never smiled,” she says of that time (one of many references to her reputation for moodiness), “and they’re not wrong.” She launched an ill-advised solo career “on autopilot”. The tabloid coverage of her became more vicious. She embraced the Wag life in the early 2000s – the big hair, the big boobs, the parties and the shopping – as an attempt to “stay in the conversation”: “I didn’t realise it at the time but I was trying to find myself. I felt incomplete, sad, frozen in time.” The Spice Girls’ brief reunion tour in 2007-08 made her realise she didn’t belong on stage, and she decided to pursue her true passion: fashion. “I knew that to start this new chapter of my life I had to change, strip the other personas away,” she says. “I became a simpler, more elegant version of myself, and I went to work.”
The first two thirds of this story have already been documented recently and at length (though from her husband’s perspective) in Beckham, and so Victoria could not have dwelled on these years without significant repetition. Indeed, some of what archive footage there is has been recycled. There are some breathtaking reminders of just how repulsive TV commentary once was: AA Gill tells Jonathan Ross “she’s got that sort of used look”; Brian Sewell declares her “just a common little bitch”. But the majority of the doc is dedicated to her fashion career, an advert for her perseverance and work ethic – and for her brand.
We follow her as she prepares for her biggest show yet, in the grounds of a dilapidated castle in Paris; industry greats Anna Wintour, Tom Ford, Donatella Versace and Roland Mouret describe the ruthless world she has fought to dominate, the snobbery she has had to overcome. But here the adversity is largely concocted – the weather forecast means her show’s a wash-out – or self-induced: her profligate spending at one time drove the company into millions of pounds’ worth of debt.
The frustrating thing is, Victoria Beckham is clearly so much more than this. She is archly funny (“You could make a cheese and ham toasted sandwich and we’d be proud of you,” David tells her, in a staged one-on-one by a lake; “Let’s be honest, I couldn’t actually make a cheese sandwich very well,” she replies), steely and – defying all the stereotypes of celeb fashion collabs and fragrance launches – a talented artist. There is so much of interest in her story: the struggle of a wife to step out from the shadow of the world’s most famous footballer; the symbiotic relationship between the terrible tabloids and brand Beckham; the toll of a journey of self-discovery and reinvention played out on the world stage. Instead, the show Victoria Beckham is cashmere, expensive, beige – beautiful and boring.
Victoria Beckham
Netflix
[Further reading: Alan Partridge’s late style]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor