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London is playing its part perfectly: drizzling, biting cold, gusts of leaves harassing pedestrians. It is only late afternoon, but dark enough for the streetlamps to buzz on. This is London’s signature season: frozen between fall and not quite winter. Inside Dorian restaurant the windows are fogging up with quiet conversations, candles blink, and a gleaming, rarefied Holland Park evening is coming to life.
“I love this place,” says Victoria Beckham. “I live just down the road. It reminds me a little bit of New York in the ’90s.”
Beckham had walked in a moment earlier, and everyone in the restaurant was working hard not to notice. Despite her diminutive frame, she is highly noticeable. Wearing a thin, gray turtleneck sweater tucked into her tailored dark wool trousers, she could be almost any fancy businesswoman. But then there’s the hair, the skin, the makeup — all of it gleaming and highly tended to, like it was generated by AI. In defense of my fellow patrons, it is hard to look away.
We scooch (one of us more gracefully than the other) into the corner banquette.
“I just finished shooting my pre-collection,” Beckham explains, apologizing for being half an hour late. “We always run a few fashion lines at the same time because the development process is what it is — main collections, pre-collections, bags, shoes, glasses. Then with beauty, we just launched three fragrances.”
The restaurant manager materializes at our table, a bottle of Burgundy balanced on his forearm like a newborn baby. “Do I like that one?” she asks him, tilting her head, as if she’s asking her husband of 25 years to remind her of her own tastes.
“This was the first wine you drank here,” says the manager. “You said you loved it.” Then, sotto voce, he confides: “I got some in just for you.”
Victoria Beckham is now 49. We first met her in 1996, when she was Posh Spice, and we didn’t even know she had a real name. In 1999, she married David Beckham, emerging from the primordial manufactured-pop-star ooze in a way that almost no one else could. Instead of fading into a world of Range Rovers and private school drop-off paparazzi photos, she cut her hair, got to work, and eventually transformed into Victoria Beckham, fashion designer. Since then she has pivoted between spouse and designer, until this most recent chapter, one you might title, “If You Think I’m Just a Footballer’s Wife, You Can Kiss My Ass.”
Beckham turns to me. “I mean, are we going to drink a bottle?”
“I guess we could try?”
“Well, okay.”
I’ve been with Victoria Beckham for 10 minutes and am already acutely aware of my vaguely grotesque humanness. For one thing, Beckham doesn’t wrinkle, and neither do her clothes. She has no hangnails, no creases, and I bet the last time she had a piece of cilantro between her teeth was the mid-nevers. Every inch of her is intentional, a study in the defiance of laziness. When aliens beam down to planet Earth, I vote for Victoria Beckham as ambassador. It will be a meeting of two life forms from a higher plane. The aliens will absorb her superhuman flawlessness — and maybe recognize her as one of their own. She’s our best chance at intergalactic peace.
“Do you ever sit on the couch and eat potato chips?” I ask, holding out hope.
“I’ve never been that person,” she says, leaving me to drift alone on an island of couches and potato chips. Maybe she feels bad, because then she adds, “Look, I love to go out and have a drink and have fun. It’s got to be about balance.”
I’m not saying she’s lying. What I’m saying is that to look at her, to be drunk on the delicate mist of Victoria Beckham Beauty Suite 302 Eau de Parfum, is to question how often that balance tips in the direction of sloth. Like, when the rest of us call it a day and collapse on the nearest couch (and maybe watch a Netflix show starring Victoria Beckham), Beckham herself may step into a cryogenic freezer and stop the laws of the natural world from encroaching on her.
But I’m here to encroach. Don’t we all want to know what lies beneath the manicured façade? Of course we do, because the real person is more interesting than the image on the billboard. “What was the last thing you and David fought about?” I ask.
“Me and David? The last thing we fought about?” She furrows her brow, sort of. “I might have to come back to you on that because I can’t remember the last time we fought.”
The conversation turns back to business. “I’ve worked hard to get here, to be given that stamp of approval in Paris by the industry in both fashion and beauty, and you know what? That’s a tough thing to accomplish,” she says, clearly proud. “I have built two successful businesses. Fashion is now profitable, beauty is profitable.” (Victoria Beckham launched her fashion line in 2008, with beauty following in 2019, and hit profitability last year.)
Of course, she is not all business. Her favorite podcast right now is SmartLess, which she listens to whenever she’s on the “stair climber thing,” which she does right before her trainer comes in for a few hours. She repeats this madness five days a week. Scratch that — she is all business.
A waiter appears with two wine glasses, each the size of a cantaloupe. He yanks the cork out of the bottle and pours.
“I’ve always had to work really hard,” Beckham continues. “At school, I had to work really hard to get less-than-average grades. When I was dancing and singing, I had to work really hard to be good, but was never good enough. I was an alright dancer. I was an alright singer. People were very quick to say, ‘You can’t sing.’ I can joke about it better than anybody. I’ll take the mickey out of myself.”
She deliberates, and then puts a bit of the mickey back. “I mean, obviously, I could sing a little. But I always had to work very hard just to be okay at anything. That’s why the Spice Girls worked: Individually we were underdogs, but collectively we worked.”
For the rest of us, being 20% of a ’90s pop phenomenon would be career enough. For Beckham, it was a means to an end: “My passion was always fashion. It’s what I always wanted to do. I just never knew how to get there.”
There is now here.
“I test everything. If you were to say, ‘What are the two items you don’t leave the house without?’ BabyBlade Brow. I’m obsessed with brows — my husband has never seen me without my eyebrows. And Instant Brightening Waterline Pencil to make my eyes look more awake. Makeup is my thing. Probably the only thing I was any good at in school was art.”
School was a defining era for Victoria Adams, as she was then known. “I’ve never really told my story about being the underdog at school,” she says, looking up at the ceiling. “I was bullied — a lot.”
(Technically, she has spoken about this before. But it’s a tale worth retelling.)
“How old were you?”
“Gosh, I suppose 11 or 12? I never fitted in socially. And when anybody is different, kids can be really mean,” says Beckham. “I remember being mentally bullied, physically bullied, literally pushed around.”
It’s a short walk between remembering your own childhood and judging the one you’ve built for your children. “I have always said to [my daughter] Harper, ‘If you see a little girl sitting on her own in the playground, that was your mum. Go up and talk to that little girl.’”
We can all relate to the sad solitude of the coming-of-age years, but for Beckham, it’s more than that. The little girl alone on the playground, the one with no friends, the one who had to work hard to get less-than-average grades, the one who was literally pushed around, they are like a board of advisors to the woman on the surface.
“My entire school life was a misery, an absolute misery. Kids can be bloody horrible,” says Beckham. “I would never, ever allow my children to treat anybody like that. I know everybody thinks their kids are angels, but my kids are genuinely very kind. That’s the most important thing, isn’t it?”
Has bullying served a purpose in her life?
“It gave me a tough skin for what was to come next,” she says. “I never really talk about it because we had this British tabloid culture. It can be…challenging, shall we say.” She pauses to take a sip of wine. “There were times I felt too self-conscious to sit on the beach with my children because of the attention and the paparazzi.”
She takes out her lipstick (her own Bitten Lip Tint) and dabs it on. At this point everyone in the restaurant is openly staring.
A brief addendum to the potato chip question: Famous people, nonfamous people, quasi-famous people all have fallibilities and fuckups and missteps. But say you have to work really hard your whole life to just be…okay. Singing, dancing, studying, whatever — your biggest enemy is your own mediocrity. So the fight becomes your superpower. You unlock the miracle of discipline. It leads you to fame and riches and unimaginable success. It is your elder wand, your holy grail, and eventually your DNA (not playing by the rules of science here). The last thing you’re going to do is relinquish that.
Maybe after all those decades welding closed every gap in her armor to ward off intrusive, relentless media scrutiny, Beckham doesn’t just play at being opaque. Maybe she is. Maybe the real her is the self-controlled disciplinarian she presents to the public (and profile interviewers). Her own husband has never seen her real eyebrows. We see precisely what she wants us to see. It’s the ultimate control.
But there is one window she throws wide open: “My kids are very creative, very supportive, very sporty, all very nice, all good senses of humor,” she says. “And they’re all very humble kids — they really are.”
It’s not easy to imagine Victoria Beckham wiping off her dagger-length pink gel tips on an apron. And it’s even harder to believe her kitchen floor has ever seen so much as a single Elmer’s glue spill. Yet despite the private jets and giant sunglasses, listening to her talk about her kids (she has four — three boys, men now, and a girl), you hear the mama bear within her. “You’ve got to get to know who they are,” she says, articulating the sole purpose of parenthood. “You’ve got to support and encourage and guide that.”
Rules in the Beckham house are simple: “Work hard. Be kind. Be nice. Making eye contact is important. Be polite, shake hands, those kinds of things,” she says. “We’re both strict parents without wanting to stifle them too much.” They’re also both worriers: “I still check on [her 12-year-old daughter] Harper when she’s in bed. We all say ‘I love you’ before we fly. From the minute you find out you’re pregnant, you worry.”
And, as with any family, there are the moments that knock the wind out of you. Beckham recalls, “Harper wrote me a card saying, ‘I’m so proud of you, Mommy, and everything that you do. You’re the best mommy. You work so hard, and look at everything you’ve achieved. You’re my best friend.’”
In October, Netflix released Beckham, a four-part documentary that swept the world up in a relaxed, gorgeous, lightly propagandist — it was produced by, among others, a company David Beckham cofounded — fervor. But it was more than a career recap of one of the world’s greatest soccer players. It was a reminder of how shitty we — and by “we” I mainly mean “the British public” — have been to the couple.
“The other night, me and David drove to our country house and went to the local pub,” she says. When they got back to their car, “someone had put a note under the windscreen wiper: ‘Dear Posh and Becks, On behalf of all the British football fans, we are sorry.’ David joked, ‘We need to go out and lap this up more often.’”
“Cruz, our youngest son, said, ‘Wow, I had no idea Dad was so good at football,’” she says, smiling. “It made me laugh, when I come up on the screen: ‘David Beckham’s wife.’ Brilliant.”
The other day she was in a restaurant, and as a group of young girls walked out, one of them slipped her a note: “‘We watched the documentary. You came across really well.’ I was like, ‘Hang on! I’m the one people think is really unfriendly!’”
Victoria Beckham is nothing if not self-aware. For decades, she denied us access to her innermost anything, and we placed a “Hello My Name Is: Unfriendly” sticker on her chest. It doesn’t help that she was often pouting, only wore stilettos, and her cheekbones look like a lesson in human geometry.
“When you put a control freak in a situation where she’s not in control, of course that’s quite uncomfortable,” she says of the documentary. “But I think people then saw the real me. If I’d been all over it in a controlling way — how do I look from this angle? — maybe the outcome would’ve been very different.”
Or would it? It’s not as if there’s footage of her nap-drooling or putting toothpaste on a blemish. She is just as poised and in control on camera as she is off. In her defense, though, she can occasionally be a bit messy. In any case, Beckham gives no indication that she thinks being controlling is a bad thing.
“I'm involved in every aspect of the business with both fashion and beauty,” says the control freak. “There’s not a single thing that goes out that I don't see.”
“Was everything else just a precursor to having your own fashion and beauty lines?” I ask.
“What, you mean Spice Girls? Absolutely. I’m at my happiest in design meetings or in the creative beauty meetings,” says Beckham. “This is where I belong.”
Spend enough time with Victoria Beckham and you realize she may have passed this sensibility on to her daughter. “Harper is obsessed with makeup, obsessed with beauty,” she notes. “We were driving past her favorite makeup store, Space NK, the other day, and David said, ‘Oh, my goodness, your favorite store closed.’ It was so funny. She was like, ‘No, it’s fine, Daddy. Nobody panic. They’re just expanding.’”
The world of beauty and the proclivities of young girls can go hand in hand — or toe to toe. The relationship is just that fraught. At one end of the tightrope, makeup is fun and empowering! And at the other end, true beauty comes from within. It’s a tension of opposites that young women and their mothers have long had to navigate.
“[Yesterday Harper said,] ‘I’ve got a gap in my teeth, Mommy. And I’ve got that little mole right here.’ I’m like, ‘That’s your lucky gap.’ And Cindy Crawford is a family friend, so I said, ‘Cindy was told to remove her mole, and that mole is what makes Cindy Cindy Crawford.’”
A few years ago, Beckham publicly acknowledged having her breast implants removed. I ask whether Harper knows about that. “If I’m honest, I wish I’d never [gotten implants]. It was a moment in time, and I think I can share my experiences with her,” she says, pausing. “But we’re not there just yet.”
It’s evening now. In a different universe, we’re just two women of the same age, with daughters roughly the same age, reflecting on life. What has she found on the doorstep of 50?
“It is what it is,” she says, and I hear the slow, familiar creak of a door closing in my face.
“I feel very accomplished, personally, professionally,” Beckham continues. “This is the start of a new chapter. I’ve spent years creating the foundation. Now I can start building the house.”
Sticking with this metaphor, I pry open the door.
“Is aging hard? Or do you ever look in the mirror and think, Damn, I look great?”
“I’ve never done that. I didn’t do it when I was 20. I didn’t do it when I was 30. I didn’t do it at 40.” Slam.
And then the Burgundy makes me say, “I don’t believe you.”
She raises her eyebrows at me.
Oh, yes. We’re doing this. “You have never looked in the mirror and thought that you look great?”
“I look back at pictures from when I was in the Spice Girls and think, Didn’t like your makeup there, didn’t like your outfit there. As women, I think a lot of us do that. I never thought I looked terrible. But I don't look back and go, ‘Oh, God, I wish I was that again.’ It’s not as if I’m getting older and I’m like, ‘Oh, Christ!’” she says, rolling her eyes in mock agony. “[The aging process] has always been more than that.”
She raises her glass to me, her fellow 49-year-old. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
The manager appears again, and Beckham looks up. “Thank you so much,” she says. “You were right: That is a very lovely wine.”
Then she’s quiet for a minute. We both look out the window.
“I cried when I saw the last scene of the documentary,” she tells me. Finally, we get here. The slightest crack in the door, the slightest chink in the armor.
The scene she’s talking about is a snapshot of a family evening spent cooking, talking over each other, dancing. Despite the high production values, it is all very human. “It was an emotional experience,” she says. “Then when you look at our journey and us dancing [to “Islands in the Stream”] in the tent…” Her voice trails off. She smiles to herself.
It’s pitch-black outside now. The drizzle has turned to rain. I think about Beckham’s life, the bullying she has endured, the industries she has summited, the family she has raised, the control she has mastered. In that scene at the end of the documentary, there’s also something a little sad, the way joyful, seemingly inconsequential moments make you want to hold tighter, accrue more. I get why it made her cry. I wonder if it was all worth it. No amount of discipline can stop the passage of time.
This is what I’m about to say when she looks at me in disbelief: “I can’t believe we did drink an entire bottle of wine.”
