Victoria Beckham sits down for a chat with Vogue US April 2020 and opens up about fashion, finding her life’s passion, her workout regimen after the birth of her fourth child, but also about having and juggling it all. “I’ve just been really, really busy. It doesn’t stop. I travel a lot; my team travels a lot. There’s a lot to get done in not a lot of time; it’s quite intense,” Victoria says.
On entering into the fashion world, Victoria admits that she wanted to create something that was ageless. “I wanted clothes that were flattering, timeless, good quality,” she says. “That was something that Marc Jacobs said to me at the beginning. He said, ‘If you have the best quality, people can always say it’s not their taste. But not that it’s rubbish.’” And remembering her presentation on the first day, she confesses that, “Nobody told me what they thought. And then the retailers came in – very different from the press; they’ll tell you what they think. They really liked it.”
In time, Victoria managed to move away from the rigorousness of her first collections. “At first, I wanted clothes that people would associate with me. I was probably a little bit more self-conscious then – I was afraid to wear things that weren’t super-supertight. In those days, I wore a lot of corsetry. That was a sign of my own insecurities,” she says. “By season three or four, I started doing a lot more research about things that I didn’t like. And I started challenging myself. Now that I feel more confident, creatively I feel more satisfied. It doesn’t have to be tight. I love working with volume and draping away from the body,” she told Vogue. And her newly launched line is “easier, a little more relaxed. It’s the other half of my wardrobe.”
Victoria’s approach towards her work is ‘uniquely personal and subjective.’ “I’ve always had to make the best of what I’ve got. I’ve never been a six-foot-tall, skinny model [she is five feet four], so therefore I want to create an illusion. People always think I’m taller than I am – not just because of the shoes I wear but because of the way I dress. It’s all relatively streamlined,” she told Vogue.
But above all, there is also a pragmatic part. “When a season goes well,” she says, “the first thing I think is, Oh, great, I can do another season. I’m very realistic. I’m creative – but women need to want to buy the dresses.”
Speaking about getting an invitation to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, Victoria says that first they were extremely thrilled. “First, obviously, we were very, very excited,” says Victoria. Then, the panic set in. “What do you wear to the biggest wedding ever – when you’re enormously pregnant,” Victoria asked herself.
In 2020, Victoria was nominated for the British Fashion Council’s Designer Brand award. “When they read my name, I literally felt like my heart was going to jump out of my body. I’m so appreciative of my past. I respect all the girls and really enjoyed what I did then, but this is what I love to do. I didn’t plan on getting up in front of the whole British fashion industry and not keeping my cool, but I was overwhelmed; I cried three times,” she says.
On being a perfectionist, Victoria admits that, “I like to think if I’m going to work, it’s as good as it could possibly be. It’s as much as I could give. I think you either give 100 percent or you don’t give at all. But you’re the same with what you do. You’re a perfectionist, too.”
Read Victoria Beckham’s full interview in the April 2020 issue of Vogue US.
Photos courtesy of VOGUE