“We consider every single detail to make sure that ultimately everything is really flattering. That’s where I use my personal relationship with clothes.” As a woman, a designer, and a celebrity, Victoria Beckham has to be one of the most experienced in—and conscious of—what it means to appear in front of cameras. “Right from the beginning, what I was doing was always about silhouette,” she reflected at a preview.
And, of course, this is what women want to hear from her: tips on how to get dressed. That part of the fashion conversation often gets left out, or suppressed, because there are so few female designers with a voice. Also because chatting about clothes among women is regarded as a lesser form of discussion than high aesthetics, knowledge of art, film, obscure architects, and so on. Yet chat we do. Parsing the meaning is an important layer of it, but so are the questions about how any proposed change is going work out in practice.
Beckham says she works by trying things on. Design through personal experimentation has sort of become the subject of her shows. “It’s rooted in reality,” she said. “It looks simple, but everything’s considered and elevated.” Well, yes and no.
The idea of “freeze-framing” clothes in movement started her off on wired, suspended effects a few seasons ago. In this collection, there was also—apparently—the notion of what happens in fittings, incorporating rolls of fabric or perhaps spools of pattern paper around the studio.
Beckham was also working on her mission of making trouser legs look “endless” by putting shoes inside the hems, perhaps an extreme sort of ski pant effect. Her simpler, more resolved work was around elongating and narrowing her pantsuits—“a young man’s suit,” as she put it—with longer lapels and in all the variations on attenuated 1930s-influenced evening dresses she’s been perfecting and putting into practice at events, some of them on recent royal occasions.
King Charles and the British establishment as a whole have been deploying David and Victoria Beckham as part of Britain’s soft-power diplomacy. At a Buckingham Palace state banquet, Beckham wore a dark purple long-sleeve gown. And she wore a white charmeuse one to an Italian-themed dinner at the king’s Highgrove House estate. “I feel I’ve absolutely learned so much by going to these things with David,” she said. The knack: making it “understated” to observe etiquette, but fitted to a silhouette with a touch of ruching across the hips and a minimal train that (of course) on her looks amazing from every photographable angle.
Several of those signature Beckham-isms walked the runway; though again, they were intersected with some of her conceptual wired devices, opening to show skin at the midriff or neckline. Oddly, it meant the presentation of her collection sometimes got snagged between experiment and the practicality women crave from her.
She was on sure ground when she turned to thinking about what to do with the tuxedo dressing that’s also part of her evening repertoire: turning it into a feminized satin wrapped-dress version of the men’s traditional aristocratic dressing gown. Beckham quipped that she’d thought of it “because I love dressing gowns,” and her final look, a terry toweling top, reminded everyone of why that is. It’s what she wears when she delivers her wildly successful video beauty tutorials. They’re popular with women of all ages and walks of life. It’s always that understandable, straightforward, and practical advice women are looking for.
