Victoria Beckham: behind the scenes with the queen of fashion

From pop star to the designer: the reinvention of Victoria Beckham. Jess Cartner-Morley exclusive interview

Here's the thing about Victoria Beckham: a celebrity that I found, what is real life is like at least their public image. Victoria Beckham's character is so well established in popular culture - the Spice Girl who made his fortune with a face instead of singing, his wife caring for her wedding and lifestyle sunglasses behind a barricade of steel and 24 inches in size jeans design - it is disconcerting that the woman does not exist. Walking, talking Victoria Beckham is someone different. It's funny to begin with - quick with a joke, a good impersonator and a keen eye for the absurd. Much more of a girl you expect from the wife of a footballer could ever be. Smart, warm and smiling.

This is not a moment she is remotely grounded or want us. There is zero claim to be low maintenance. How Mrs Beckham rolls - Well, Joan Collins does look like a hiker. This is all the big hotels and lights on Range Rover, security details and around Louboutins breakfast. And one aspect of folklore that surrounds it is absolutely true: in all my time in the fashion industry, I have rarely met someone who is so constantly attentive to their appearance. She requested a straw to each Diet Coke, probably to avoid dislodging her lipstick. When we met for coffee recently, Harper was on his knees at all, and while one hand caressed and stroked and rearranged his newborn daughter, in fact so constantly caressed and kissed and rearranged her curls shiny tonged carefully to make sure it was just above the shoulder for that. For breakfast, she orders a plate of fruit, but not melon or banana. Once, for the ladies luncheon at Claridge's, we were all white fish served with steamed vegetables and a few roasted cherry tomatoes - except for Beckham, who arrived without a plate of cherry tomatoes, a detail she can not shake. Who knew that four cherry tomatoes could make you fat?

The question that has fascinated the fashion industry of Victoria Beckham debuted at New York Fashion Week as a designer in September 2008, where exactly is Victoria Beckham-the-fashion-designer s insert this image in fractured truths, half-truths and fiction? The success of the label, both critics and audiences, has taken the fashion industry by surprise. Examiners are consistently impressed with their processions, prestigious department stores compete for the right to sell the clothes and the customers, in turn, pay good money to make Victoria Beckham dresses - and now, as the company is to develop, handbags, too. But along this success has remained a question mark: Is Beckham, who has no formal design training, actually create clothing? Or does she just parachuted into the end of a fashion week photo shoot at the head of someone else's work? To put it bluntly, this is Victoria Beckham for real?

And so I found, on October 1 last year, to take perhaps the most glamorous job-shadowing assignment will. Victoria Beckham "people", directed by Simon Fuller, once the guru and now Spice Girl Victoria Beckham and support Roland Mouret fashion labels, according to our suggestion that I go backstage and watch him work. We made a plan for me to join Beckham at regular intervals during the time she was preparing for his second collection of the Victoria line. (Victoria -. Or, to give your full name, Victoria, Victoria Beckham - is a more casual, more affordable little brother of the line flagship Victoria Beckham tag) This is a crucial time for the Victoria Line: The spring collection is shown to the press last year is about to go on sale and Beckham are planning a party at Harvey Nichols during fashion week in London to celebrate.

Study

Beckham is in the seat of Fuller, and my first thought when walking, it is clear that Fuller never intended for this particular position of his empire to get as big as it did. A room that can comfortably accommodate four or five tables with more than twice that amount, stuck between the rails of clothes, piles of boxes and rolls of material. There are three phone calls from all so close I can hear what is said at the other end of the line, and the person in the room. Look, the "good" model in which the garments are tested in the study, is on somebody's desk in the sales team.

Victoria Beckham is in the center of everything, thin black: high heels, tight jeans, a hooded sweatshirt under a jacket fitted. "Beautiful, is not it? I told them to put in order, as it comes," he joked, looking at me take you into chaos. I am here to attend a meeting from 17:00, and jet lag is starting to hit LA. Her nails and hair and makeup are as immaculate as ever, but she looks pale and tired. Everyone seems curious about my presence - design studies are notoriously insular places - but quite comfortable with Beckham. Watching her interact with your computer, it seems increasingly likely that there is a hiding place "real" design in a closet somewhere.

the agenda today is to decide which of the first ideas for the spring line of Victoria will be held for the production, and stay on the drawing board. In a meeting room just off the study, Beckham sat down with Danny, project director for the label, Saskia sales manager, Susanne Tide-Frater (once creative director of both Selfridges and Harrods, is now a retail independent consultant) and myself. Danny is inflatable and the puppy. Saskia is blonde and beautiful, and one of those accents are available only in extraordinary ways, I can understand if it is German, or simply elegant

After a preamble on the sales of the first collection, which I think was tied to my advantage - in short everything that is selling incredibly well, like all buyers, etc., etc. - Danny begins a demonstration process and discuss 37 possible designs. Are in various stages of development, from a sketch with a sample of tissue attached to a finish coat to research. Two things become immediately clear Beckham have an excellent eye and work quickly. There is an impression that is lower in the group and she kills him immediately. Then he took a swan print dress, which is nice, but does not seem quite right, and notes that the willows in the background is too demanding and vintagey. (You are absolutely right.) Can be redone with a simplified printing?

Aa way

Beckham to be a fashion designer is certainly not the great romantic tradition of a tortured artist with his sketchbook. She is an artist who expresses himself in the fabric. But as to the authorship of clothing, it seems very doubtful. His style and taste is the life force in the room. It is a shameless vanity how it considers the collection - will be at the front of her dress in the mirror, pouting and eat her hair - and sees everything in terms of how it will look in your own body. When she says, about a jacquard dress with long sleeves, "I want to use that now," Danny smiled happily.

There is an exchange of Saskia after telling the sales manager suggests that it might consider one of the dresses with gathered neckline output instead of the modest around the neck of Beckham ruled.

"If you have legs, you can not have their breasts out," Beckham said firmly.

"I do not want to show cleavage, but what about the collarbone?" Saskia request.

Tide-Frater

it supports, noting - correctly - that women do not want to be completely covered, and many of them are happy to show a little skin in the neckline of a short skirt. "Maybe we could think of doing several different ways," she said.

"No, I do not feel necklines open to all, I prefer to keep your neck and hem the top," said David Beckham, uncrossing and recrossing her legs slim legs.

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"But the world does not have legs," Tide-Frater adds a comment that Beckham sat six inches, it seems not to hear. The issue is closed.

fashion designers vary greatly in terms of participation in the financial and business. Tom Ford points coil failure rate of sales in the conversation, Marc Jacobs, however, is very open about the fact that he neither knows nor cares about the sale price of clothing. Beckham is a natural business woman, Saskia lengthy discussion of whether the spring collection should include a long-sleeved dress of wool - the spring collections "fall" in January these days, so it makes sense to do something something warm. On the other hand, industry wisdom is that if customers see a wool dress on sale in January, is expected to decrease. Beckham decided it was essential that the clothes are matching print - panels sewn together so that the seam does not break the trend - but it takes time to weigh the cost implications. "If the game models, using tissue from a minimum of 50% and has a huge impact on the bottom line," he explains. "You end up with a dress in about two thirds the price. When I started doing this second line, people have told me to get the prices they wanted to achieve, I had to leave out the introduction of printing. But I do not like compromise because, in reality, I do not want my client walks around with a cat's ass back in front of a dress . "

For now, after 8, the meeting lasted three hours, and time of calls Beckham. Seventeen drivers will be at work tomorrow, rough running versions of today's ideas, so you can see another set of samples before she returned to Los Angeles.

A couple of days before the study visit, which met Beckham at the Hotel Savoy, where he stayed while in London. Was 8.30, but she was dressed like a dinner at Le Caprice, wearing a burgundy ankle of his own collection and high leather boots. The first thing I wanted to know was whether he had seen the first collection of Victoria, who had told me how he had tried clothes, behind a pile of chairs in a showroom in Milan. "Oh, it's good to hear," his impassive. "We like to treat people and we are a luxury brand, after all dressing behind a pile of chairs - perfect .... I bet it is a little as they do to Tom Ford "

new collection
Victoria, with its simple shapes and fun prints, the light appears a softening of the image of Beckham, in contrast with the hourglass silhouette of his main line tight. "I think I have more, I have a little more relaxed, even if no one think if you heard me yell at my children." The idea of ??a cheaper line was in the pipeline more than a year, but most of the collection was designed in the spring and summer of last year, when Beckham was pregnant with Harper. "I have been trips to London during the entire pregnancy. I came home from the last exit on the last day that the doctor had given me permission to travel. I was so pregnant when I landed in Los Angeles tried to put in a wheelchair. Can you imagine? J 'was like, I do not think so, thank you very much. "

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