After the major success of the Beckham docuseries, all about the life of soccer superstar David Beckham, Netflix is back with a series about his other half, Victoria Beckham. This three-episode docuseries charts the life of fashion mogul and former Spice Girl Victoria as she prepares for her biggest event yet, a major fashion show at a Parisian castle.
Victoria Beckham is a guarded documentary that keeps things close to the chest. Curious why she didn’t participate in the 2019 Spice Girls reunion tour? You won’t find an answer for that here. Is her eldest son, Brooklyn, feuding with Victoria and David? You won’t get an answer for that either. This three-part series often feels like a stunningly dull exercise to promote Beckham’s fashion brand, where a pair of trousers costs approximately $1500.
Mercifully, on occasion, this documentary reveals something exciting about the woman who came to fame as Posh Spice. We’ve broken down all the surprising revelations from the Victoria Beckham doc, so you can save yourself from sitting through it.
She’s battled an eating disorder
Victoria’s body images began when she was a teenager in theatre school, and she developed an eating disorder she says she was so good at hiding that even her closest family members didn’t know.
”I really started to doubt myself and not like myself and because I let it affect me, 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 have been everything from Porky Posh to Skinny Posh, I mean, it’s been a lot and that’s hard.”
Things intensified when she was in the public eye.
“I had no control over what was being written about me or the pictures that were being taken and I suppose I wanted to control that,” she says. “I could control it with the clothing, I could control my weight. I was controlling my weight in an incredibly unhealthy way.”
This is the first time she’s spoken out about it. “When you have an eating disorder you become very good at lying. And I was never honest about it with my parents,” she says. “I never spoke about it publicly, it really affects you. When you’re told constantly you’re not good enough. And I suppose that’s been with me my whole life.”
She recalls one particularly painful time where she was weighed on British television by a presenter who thought it would be funny to see if she’d lost her baby weight after the birth of her son, Brooklyn, in 1999.
“I was weighed on national television,” she says. “Get on those scales, have you lost the weight?’ we laugh about it and we joke about it but I was really, really young and that hurts.”
She took all of the Spice Girls’ clothing budget to buy designer clothes
In Beckham’s Spice Girl days, she and her fellow gals were on top of the world, garnering fans all over the world. The girl group was given a clothes budget, but since Baby, Ginger, Sporty, and Scary didn’t care about fancy clothes, Victoria took the budget for herself. In the doc, she claims that she’d never worn designer clothes before being in the Spice Girls, and she’s never looked back. Her passion for black dresses from Gucci led to many iconic photos, as well as this joke from Spice World.
She made Donatella Versace mad
When Beckham’s star was on the rise, she was invited and flown to Milan to the Versace store, where she could choose whatever she liked. As Victoria recounts it, she chose a black leather dress, but asked them to make a number of variations, including removing the sleeves, essentially redesigning the entire dress. “I really can’t believe I did that,” she says in the doc. “So rude.” Donatella Versace couldn’t agree more: “You shouldn’t do it. That’s how I feel. I thought, ‘How does she dare?” Donatella Versace says in the series. Though she admits that Victoria actually looked better on her after the adjustments, you can feel the rage emanating off her.
Felt humiliated by a Marc Jacobs campaign
When Victoria attended a Marc Jacobs show in 2007, he was touched by her presence and wrote her a letter to be in one of his new campaigns, with famed fashion photographer Jurgen Teller shooting her. She was thrilled at the opportunity, but found that the photos played around with her negative public image far too much for her liking.
“When I saw those pictures, I was horrified. It was very much poking fun at me. That’s when I realized I was a laughingstock,” says Beckham. She’d get the last laugh 10 years later, calling up Teller for another photoshoot, recreating those images to promote her own brand, Victoria Beckham.
She revealed why she doesn’t smile
OK, she does smile! If you watch the series, you can actually see her lips curve upwards on numerous occasions. But there’s a reason she never smiles in public. The relentless negative press Victoria experienced at the hands of the British media gave her an enormous crisis of confidence: “When I see a camera, I change. The barrier goes up, the armor goes on, and that’s when the miserable cow who doesn’t smile comes out.”
The constant vitriol in newspapers, radio, and television (not to mention online) warped her self-image, making her deeply self-conscious, particularly about how she’d smile. “I’d love to have the confidence to walk out of a restaurant and smile, or walk on a red carpet and smile, but I just can’t do it,” she says in Victoria Beckham.
Her business almost collapsed
Things weren’t always successful for the Victoria Beckham brand. As she reveals in the doc, her fashion firm was once “tens of millions in the red.”
“There’s a power of celebrity,” says Beckham. “People thought that I wasn’t used to hearing ‘no’. I’ll hold my hands up and be accountable for things I’ve done, and things I could have done differently. I was in debt. There was a lot I had to change. I realized I lost my way.” Her business had scaled up too quickly, and she was left in a pit. Even her husband David, a key investor, was no longer able to continue investing.
Victoria received the outside help she needed in investor David Belhassen. “I’d never seen something as hard as this to fix,” he shares in the series. rescued her business, and she launched a beauty brand that proved a big success. He almost thought there was nothing he could do, but when he saw his wife wearing a dress from her line that he loved, he did what he needed to do to turn things around.
She’s Not A Party Person
Perhaps the most genuine moment of the docuseries comes when David and Victoria have a party to attend. They get all glammed up, but once the moment comes to leave, neither of them has any actual interest in attending. They really have to psych themselves up to leave their house to go and socialize at night. Maybe celebrities really are just like us.
The post Victoria Beckham’s Most Shocking Revelations in Her Netflix Doc appeared first on The Daily Beast.
