In some ways, the new three-part Netflix docuseries Victoria Beckham is a kind of sequel to Beckham, Fisher Stevens’s four-episode ride through David’s tumultuous career. It turns the lens from the footballer to the Spice Girl-turned-fashion mogul he fell for, and gives her life the same biopic treatment. But in other ways, it isn’t; with its firm focus on the Victoria Beckham brand, it’s more akin to a fashion documentary.
It opens in the run-up to her spring 2025 show, the one staged outside the stately Chateau de Bagatelle, which featured floral dresses whose fabric seemed to float in midair. Victoria is in the midst of assembling said collection, trying on looks, adjusting cuts, choosing fabrics, and selecting models in advance of the big day.
Victoria Beckham uses this project as our central framing device—we zip back and forth between her childhood, pop star dominance, marriage, WAG era, and evolution into a fashion powerhouse, but always return to this show and its importance in cementing her brand’s place in the fashion landscape.
In the third episode’s nail-biting finale, everything falls into place—only for the weather to turn, and torrential rain to whip through the structure erected for attendees. How can the show go on? Will it need to be postponed? Will the models slip as they walk down rain-soaked stone steps? How will the press respond?
You’ll find out in the series’ final moments. But beyond that, these are the seven biggest takeaways from Victoria Beckham.
As a kid, Victoria wanted to be on the stage
Victoria Beckham features some incredible photos of Victoria as a little girl, singing, dancing, and dressed in elaborate costumes. The reason? Before she became a pop sensation, she actually wanted to do musical theater. “I used to love to dance,” she says, as we watch a clip of a tiny Victoria tap-dancing to “If My Friends Could See Me Now” from Sweet Charity. “I was a performer. I knew every single lyric of every single song in the West End.” (As her mom reveals later, she auditioned for Cats as a kid, and got a callback for Starlight Express.)
Mainly, she says, she enjoyed the sense of escapism. “I was definitely a loner at school,” she remembers. “I was bullied. I was awkward. I didn’t fit in at all. But when you’re on stage, for that moment, you’re somebody else. I didn’t really want to be me, I didn’t like me. I desperately wanted to be liked.”
And that passion for musical theater helped pave her way to the top. When auditioning for her spot in the Spice Girls—the band was formed by a management company that held auditions for a girl group that could rival the biggest boy bands of the ’90s—she didn’t sing a Madonna or Whitney Houston song like everyone else, but “Mein Herr” from Cabaret. “I think I’m more eccentric than I ever really realized,” she adds, smiling.
As we see later, when she and her daughter Harper are making a TikTok, Victoria still has moves—she just doesn’t like to tap dance anymore.
As Posh, she hogged the band’s clothing budget
Though the Spice Girls had an allowance for clothes, “the other girls weren’t really into fashion,” Victoria says. “That left a really nice budget for me.” In one clip, Geri Halliwell complains: “You know what I end up getting? A £20 thing from Oxfam. She nicks all my money.” As for what Victoria did with it? “I went to Gucci,” she admits. “I’d never ever owned a designer garment before—and then fashion became everything.”
She risked Donatella’s ire at her first Versace show
There are a number of starry cameos in Victoria Beckham, from Victoria’s longtime friend Eva Longoria to Tom Ford and Anna Wintour, but my personal favorite is Donatella Versace, the first designer to invite Victoria to a fashion show. When Donatella first appears onscreen, she stares down the lens and asks the cameraperson, “Do you like my make-up?” Beat. “It’s Victoria Beckham.” Iconic.
Donatella first met Victoria in 1997, when her daughter was obsessed with the Spice Girls. The invitation to Versace was a thrill for Victoria: the brand arranged for a private plane to take her to Milan and gave her free rein at the Versace store. “I selected a black leather dress. I remember trying on the dress, looking in the mirror, and saying, ‘I really like the dress, but how about let’s tighten it here, shorten it here, take off the sleeves.’ Basically, I redesigned the whole dress. I really can’t believe I did that. So rude.”
Donatella concurs: “You shouldn’t do it. I thought, ‘How does she dare?’ Then, I realized it was better on her, the way she did it. She knows her body.”
The Baden-Baden era served its purpose
Later on in the first episode, we get a closer look at Victoria’s time in Baden-Baden, when she made front pages with her tiny minis, tight tanks, bug-eye sunglasses, and giant Birkins. “Look, it was fun,” Victoria says, laughing. “I had big boobs. I had big hair. Us ladies were shopping and we were owning it. I remember seeing one of these wives that had bought so many designer clothes and had so many bags that she couldn’t get in the revolving doors at the Baden-Baden hotel.”
Looking at these photos now, she says, “I smile. 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—from Spice Girl to WAG. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was trying to find myself. I felt incomplete, sad, frozen in time, maybe? I was appreciative of what I had, but I need a sense of purpose.”
She was horrified by her Marc Jacobs campaign—but turned the tables on it a decade later
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In 2007, Victoria caused quite the kerfuffle when she attended a Marc Jacobs show. Marc wrote her a letter afterward, asking her to be in his campaign, and she agreed. When she saw the photos, though, “I was horrified.” They leaned into Victoria’s public image at the time and were far from glamorous. “It was very much poking fun at me, and that’s when I realized I was a laughing stock. No one took me seriously in this industry. I knew I wanted to be a designer. I knew I had a point of view. But I also knew that I needed someone to believe in me.”
A decade later, though, she returned to the concept. Now a designer in her own right, she found herself losing her way and her DNA fading from her brand. In an effort to “put Victoria Beckham back into Victoria Beckham,” she called Juergen Teller, who’d photographed her for that Marc Jacobs campaign, and asked him to recreate it for her own brand. “When he shot me 10 years ago, the laugh was on me. But I wanted to reclaim that image for myself.”
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To make it in fashion, she had to “kill the WAG”
Crucial to Victoria’s success in fashion was the designer Roland Mouret, who became an important early mentor. “Roland saw something,” Victoria remembers. “We connected and he believed in me. He was very, very honest and really, really tough.” He told her that “the enemy was fear and lack of self-esteem. To make the dream become reality, we had to kill the WAG.” Victoria complied. “I buried those boobs in Baden-Baden,” she says. “I became a simpler, more elegant version of myself.”
Her partnership with David Belhassen saved her business
In the second and third episode, Victoria speaks candidly about the difficulties she faced in the fashion business, as her independent label was scaled up rapidly from intimate presentations to blockbuster shows. She eventually found herself backed into a corner, with losses running up to the millions and David, whose financial input had been essential, unable to keep investing. “The entire house was crashing down,” she remembers. “I was losing my business. I needed outside investment. I needed someone to help me.”
Enter: investor David Belhassen. When he looked into the company’s finances he thought, “Frankly, I’d never seen something as hard as this to fix.” Initially, he declined to come on board. Victoria was devastated. “I felt heartbroken,” she says through tears, in what might be the docuseries’s most emotional moment. “I was desperate.” What changed Belhassen’s mind, however, was his wife: When the couple were going out on a Saturday night, she wore a stunning dress from Victoria Beckham.
Belhassen describes tightening the belt on the business—one of the extravagant expenses that needed to be curtailed involved the €70,000 being spent on office plants per year, as well as the €15,000 someone was being paid to water them. “She told me, ‘I won’t let you down,’” he says. After she presents the spring 2025 collection in Victoria Beckham’s penultimate sequence, Belhassen declares: “She never gave up, and finally, it’s working. We turned the business around. But it’s just a drop in the water. There’s such a huge world we haven’t tackled.”
Victoria Beckham is streaming now on Netflix.
