A decade later, though, she returned to the concept. Now a designer in her own right, she found herself losing her way and her own 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 brand. “When he shot me 10 years ago, the laugh was on me. But I wanted to reclaim that image for myself.”
To make it in fashion, she had to “kill the WAG”
Crucial to Victoria’s success in fashion was Roland Mouret, a designer whose dresses she loved, 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 decided not to come on board. Victoria was devastated. “I felt heartbroken,” she says through tears, in what might be the docuseries’ most emotional moment. “I was desperate.” What changed Belhassen’s mind, was his wife – when the couple were going out on a Saturday night, she wore a stunning dress from Victoria Beckham. He thought, “We have to do it.”
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 SS25 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.
