Posh Spice's rebranding an act many stars would envy

As singer turned designer Victoria Beckham takes centre stage in a new documentary, Katie Rosseinsky looks at how she managed to flip the script on her celebrity reputation

- Katie Rosseinsky

Spice Girl. Aspiring solo singer. Queen of the Wags. Tabloid figure of fun. Celebrated fashion designer. Head of Britain's other royal family. Across three decades in the public eye, Victoria Beckham has undergone a very public metamorphosis, the likes of which few stars would have been able to pull off.

If, for example, around the time that Spice World was released in cinemas in 1997, you'd learnt that the Posh one in the “little Gucci dress” would actually end up showing her collections at Paris Fashion Week (and the crowd would lap it up), you'd be forgiven for raising a sceptical eyebrow. And yet, since her girl band days, Victoria has managed to flip the script on her public persona almost entirely. “I wouldn’t call it a reinvention,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2020. “I'd say it’s been an evolution.”

The next step in this “evolution”? Her latest incarnation as a Netflix star. Victoria Beckham, a three-part documentary, arrives on the streaming platform today, and promises to look back at her music career and life in the spotlight, as well as delving into the struggles she’s faced while building her eponymous fashion brand. “It takes quite a lot to make me cry, but I did cry,” the 51-year-old recently told The Sunday Times of her filming experience.

This apparently more candid, less guarded Victoria is miles away from the woman who’d famously refuse to smile in photos. So how has she pulled off such an effective reputational 180?

Rewind to the late Nineties when Victoria Adams was best known as one-fifth (later one-quarter) of the Spice Girls. Her girlband star status meant that when she started dating rising footballer David Beckham, she was very much the more famous half of the pair. After the band split in 2001, though, having never really bounced back from Geri Halliwell’s departure a few years earlier, she seemed to flounder a little.