Victoria Beckham turns 50 and is an absolute queen

After the adventure with the Spice Girls ended in 2000, Vctoria Beckham, young and eager to succeed, still tries her hand at music with the hidden awareness that something else good and diversified awaits her. She writes books, does consultancy, creates clothing lines with a decidedly urban and casual style. In 2001 she published her autobiography, Learning to Fly, for Michael Joseph. The Autobiography . a motivational boost that relaunches it in the eyes of the voracious marked. If in 2005 VB Rocks was released on the market, a line of jeans characterized by a feminine fitting and rich in details, in 2006 she created DVB Style together with her husband David to enrich clothing with perfumes. A year later, in 2007, she published the second book That Extra Half an Inch: Hair, Heels and Everything In Between ( Penguin Books) , a fashion and beauty advice manual that has been very successful in Great Britain. The road is now marked forever.

In 2017, the Beckhams' eldest son, Brooklyn, also published What I See for Penguin, a random photographic book of the life of a privileged young man trying to emerge in a sea of ​​prejudices. "a book for teenagers, by a teenager" will say Francesca Dow, managing director of Penguin Random House Children's to stem the criticisms and comments on such a bold and ambitious project. Curtain.

And that's exactly how it is. Brooklyn, 25 years old born in 1999, Romeo in 2002, Cruz in 2005 and Harper in 2011 (she turns 13 in July this year) are the driving force behind everything, her fan base. Sitting in the front row at the Victoria Beckham brand fashion shows, together with their father David and the new entry Nicola Peltz, wife of Brooklyn, they support her with great enthusiasm.

We know Victoria Beckham's sense of fashion well. Over time, that bold style oriented towards a certain minimalism has become such a trademark that it has generated an increasingly growing following of enthusiasts and fans. Since she founded the eponymous brand in 2008, Beckham has started a hoard of awards and recognitions: in 2011 the "Best Designer Brand" category at the British Fashion Awards, the "Accessories Designer of the Year" award at the UK Glamor Women of the Year Awards and the “Emerging British Luxury Brand” recognition at the Walpole Awards. In short, the snobbery of the fashion system had decided to "have seen her" and therefore to support her. The joint venture between Victoria Beckham and Simon Fuller XIX Entertainment Ltd. has definitely brought excellent results. But there was a key moment that marked a definitive change in direction of that still too chrome-plated reflection of public identity. When, in 2016 during New York Fashion Week , she received post-show applause in totally radical chic flat shoes and oversized volumes. Without heels and designed silhouette. The transition to that aesthetic intellectualism was decisive in moving from the role of fashion victim to deus ex machina of the fashion system.

The VB universe is truly completed in 2019 with the Victoria Beckham Beauty sector, a transversal line that includes products for skin care, makeup and fragrances. It is a success that grows every day. And the secret is always one: the credibility of those who know the beauty world and live it constantly, in a bath of vanity that is legitimized and necessary here. After a moment of difficulty during the stasis of the pandemic, today it is in effect a reference brand for the clean beauty movement. And to support an effective and transversal narrative, the Victoria Beckham YouTube channel is a real treasure of story clips and revelations of backstage content of both the brand and the designer.

Can we consider it a chapter in the history of modern meta-fashion communication? Of course yes. In 2008 Victoria let herself be portrayed "objectified" by Juergen Teller for Marc Jacobs' spring summer campaign in a quote from the reading of the feminine by another master of fashion photography, Guy Bourdin. It is certainly a curious operation, of interchange and deconstruction of the perfect and composed stereotype that Beckham had used until then, useful to relaunch her in a new register at the beginning of her second life as a fashion designer. Fortunately, that British irony does not fade away with time, on the contrary. Ten years later, on the occasion of the London debut of her brand, the designer recreates the same situation by triangulating with the same protagonists and above all with the complicity of Jacobs who accepts to be affectionately "plagiarized". From that series of shots, a teaser t-shirt was created and sold close to the fashion show, which obviously sold like hotcakes. Within the viral project, a slot in the London store where Victoria at the checkout dedicated herself to bagging that t-shirt depicting her inside her brand's shopping bag and actually putting it inside her brand's shopping bag.