A third of the way through Netflix’s new documentary Victoria Beckham, we hear the slow, sad harmony of the Spice Girls’ song “Goodbye.” The 1998 ballad was the British pop group’s first release after Geri Halliwell (aka Ginger Spice) made her shocking exit, and it was billed as the band’s remaining members bidding a fond farewell to their friend. Here, though, the song serves a new purpose that also mirrors that of the documentary itself: allowing Beckham to bid farewell to Posh Spice. As we see grainy concert footage of her and the other Spice Girls standing on various stages for the group’s 2007–2008 reunion tour, Beckham reveals that those shows solidified for her that she no longer wished to be a performer. “I hadn’t been Posh in such a long time,” she says, referring to her Spice Girls persona as a character that was always distinct from herself and to which she’d increasingly become a stranger. Instead, Beckham decided she would throw herself fully into the fashion world as part of a new quest to become a respected designer. “I knew that to start this new chapter of my life, I had to change—strip the other personas away,” she said.
Victoria Beckham, which began streaming on Thursday, makes plain that its subject has been playing a series of roles throughout her life, in one way or another. There was Posh, of course, the Gucci-clad yet always grumpy member of the Spice Girls, and to some, its weakest singer. (She was the only member of the group who didn’t get her own verse on “Wannabe,” and in 2016, she admitted that during live performances, the band’s production team often turned off her microphone.) Then came Victoria Beckham the solo artist, a meandering and generally forgettable turn that she admits she mostly sleepwalked through, feeling lost. But during these years she was also playing the part of Victoria Beckham, wife to one of England’s most famous footballers and one half of a global power couple known to this day as “Posh and Becks.” This role came with another identity: That of the so-called WAG, a member of the class of “wives and girlfriends” of athletes, a bit part that mostly required her to be hounded by paparazzi and appear in endless photos as stern, impossibly thin, and sporting a series of mostly severe and occasionally blond bobs and pixie cuts. These days, in addition to being matriarch of a family in which many members are striving for the limelight, she’s also a brand in the literal sense, having run the fashion label that bears her name since 2008.
Unlike Fisher Stevens’ very fine 2023 documentary on Beckham’s footballer husband, which was a granular recounting of both David’s sports career and the pair’s marriage, Victoria Beckham (which was directed by Nadia Hallgren, who also made the Michelle Obama documentary Becoming) instead functions mostly as a vehicle to firmly position its protagonist in this final, starring role as a successful fashion designer. Much of the documentary is spent building toward Beckham’s 2024 show at Paris Fashion Week, which she repeatedly tells us is the biggest of her career. As such, Spice Girls fans hoping that the documentary might shine new light on the girl group, ’90s bubblegum pop, or celebrity culture more generally—perhaps prompting a cultural reassessment or even public introspection the way similar projects on Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, and Paris Hilton have recently done—will leave deeply disappointed. No other members of the group are even interviewed for the series—an omission that feels both shocking and telling. “One of the girls actually said to me—and it did upset me, not too long ago actually—it was Melanie B who said to me, ‘Don’t forget where you’ve come from,’ ” Beckham says, hinting at tension with her former bandmates. “I have never forgotten where I’ve come from. I’ve never ever forgotten that Posh Spice is the reason I’m sitting here now.”
Still, it’s a part of Beckham’s life that she seems more than happy to leave behind. The three-part, 143-minute series (it seems nothing on Netflix is ever allowed to exist as one long single piece of media) speeds through those critical teen-pop years in roughly its first 20 minutes. We don’t learn, for example, about what went into building the Spice Girls, what it was like to become one of the most famous women in music at a time when male rappers and rock groups were dominant, or what led to the group’s collapse (or its eventual reforming). We hear TV talking heads utter incredibly sexist and demeaning things about her but never hear from her about how she coped with such misogyny. (“He’s fantastically talented,” one commentator says of David Beckham in an old TV segment. “She wears a lot of clothes.” Another is even more crude: “She’s just a common little bitch.”) Instead, we see endless scenes of Beckham working ahead of this climactic Paris show—tweaking designs on patient models or commanding a large staff—the inclusion of which seems at least partially intended to silence critics who, as noted in the documentary, have previously accused her of not designing her own pieces.
Indeed, almost two decades into her fashion career, it’s clear Beckham still has a chip on her shoulder. Part of this is because when she first launched her label, she had to overcome expectations that she was just another celebrity, like Jessica Simpson or Nicky Hilton, who was lazily leveraging her name. “I knew what people thought,” Beckham recalls.
“She was a pop star. She’s married to a footballer. Who does she think she is?” But part of this is also because Beckham has always felt a little like a fraud as she cosplays in her various personas. In the U.K., where one’s accent can be seized on by some as a social shibboleth, she always sounded decidedly more middle class than posh. She was raised in Hertfordshire, north of London, by a father who was an electrical engineer and a mother who worked as an insurance clerk and hairdresser. The pair even remortgaged their home to send their daughter to theater school. (Although, as she admitted in a viral exchange in the 2023 David Beckham documentary, her father did, for a time, drive a Rolls-Royce.) Sure, Posh Spice wore designer clothes, but her vibe was distinctly New Money, not Old. “My mom’s really pleased that they’re saying that [I’m posh], but I don’t really think that I am,” she admits in one archival clip, in which her accent is a lot gruffer than it is today.
As she and her family followed David’s soccer career to Spain and then the U.S., Beckham posed on red carpets and endured the tabloids as a dutiful WAG—a part Beckham admits she gamely played, even if she didn’t truthfully feel it was really her. “There was an element of attention-seeking, if I’m being completely honest. It was at a time when I didn’t feel creatively fulfilled. So it was how I stayed in the conversation,” Beckham says. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was trying to find myself. I felt incomplete. Sad. Frozen in time, maybe.”
To make it in fashion, her mentor, the French designer Roland Mouret, explains, Beckham needed to “kill the WAG” in the public’s mind and become a workhorse, not just a clotheshorse. Victoria Beckham then primarily exists to show us this work, detailing how she built a company, how she struggled to win industry respect, and how she eventually turned around a business that had been unprofitable. Yet for a documentary centered on a fashion designer (featuring the requisite cameos from Anna Wintour, Donatella Versace, and Tom Ford), we actually learn very little about Beckham’s creative process or inspirations. Instead, what we’re told repeatedly is that she has drive, which is all that matters. It all feels very much like an ad for both the label and this latest Beckham iteration. (It’s worth noting here that the documentary was produced by David Beckham’s production company, Studio 99, though that didn’t stop the documentary about him from being compelling.)
It’s understandable that much of Victoria Beckham would be spent exploring the part of her career to which she has devoted most of her life and of which she is evidently most proud. Hers is a remarkable story of leveraging fame and media to build something new—a tale of how the Spice Girl with the fewest expectations became its most enduring success story. But with a documentary that seems unwilling to peer beneath the surface, and a subject only willing to lower the drawbridge so far, viewers can’t be blamed if they’re still left wondering which is the real Victoria Beckham.
