Victoria Beckham has revealed that her out-of-control spending, with no one saying no to her, nearly bankrupted her fashion line and put a strain on her marriage.
Her husband, soccer legend David Beckham, admits he “paniced” when the Victoria Beckham brand went into huge debt and was “tens of millions in the red” in his eponymous new miniseries, which will be released on Netflix on Thursday.
“It was tough for both of us for her to have to come to me and say, ‘We need more money for the business,'” says David, 50, in the three-part docu-series. “Because I didn’t have the money to keep doing this, so ultimately I was like, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’
Victoria, 51, started her fashion house in 2008, but overexpansion and the ex-Spice Girl’s lavish spending ($70,000 a year on plants alone, with employees paying an extra $15,000 just to water them) nearly put them out of business.
The star confessed to doing “weird things like flying chairs from one side of the world to the other,” adding, “I shudder to hear that now. People were afraid to say no to me…That’s the power of celebrity, and people thought I wasn’t used to hearing the word ‘no.'”
These aren’t the only turmoils Victoria reveals in the series, which follows her as she prepares for the Paris Fashion Show in September 2024.
The famously thin star has revealed publicly for the first time how she hid what she calls an “eating disorder.”
“When you have an eating disorder, you’re very good at lying,” Victoria says. “And I’ve never been honest with my parents about it, and I’ve never talked about it in public.
“When you’re constantly told that you’re not good enough, it really affects you. I think it’s probably been going on all my life.”
David slammed the media for criticizing his wife’s weight in the ’90s, including when a British talk show host forced her to step on a scale on camera just six months after the birth of their son Brooklyn, now 26.
“There were a lot of things happening on TV back then that wouldn’t happen now, that wouldn’t happen now,” he says.
“The Victoria that I knew was sitting at home smiling and laughing and drinking wine in her jersey. It was purely because of the criticism she was receiving that she started quitting.”
Victoria, who has been called “everything from Porky Posh to Skinny Posh,” said: “I started really doubting myself and not liking myself and letting it affect me. I looked in the mirror and didn’t see what I was seeing. Was I fat? Was I thin? I lost all sense of reality…I couldn’t control what was being written about me, what pictures were being taken of me, and I wanted to control it, you know?
“I was in control with my clothes, I was in control of my weight, but I was controlling my weight in an incredibly unhealthy way.”
Her desperation was fueled, at least in part, by her longing for acceptance from the fashion industry, including the endorsement of Vogue guru Anna Wintour.
Wintour, who is now a front row regular at Victoria’s runway shows, admitted in the series that she was “skeptical” and a bit “snobby” about the former Spice Girl when she was an aspiring fashion designer, adding: “Most of the celebrities involved in our world are not true designers.”
Victoria says she had to become a “simpler, more elegant version of herself” to fit into that world.
“We had to kill the WAGs,” said her fashion mentor, designer Roland Mouret, of Posh’s flamboyant look in tiny trousers, a giant Birkin bag and sunglasses that covered half her face, alongside the wives and girlfriends of David’s England team-mates at the 2006 World Cup in Germany.
“I buried those boobs in Baden-Baden,” Victoria says with a laugh after having her Barbie-like breast implants removed.
She also revealed that her spending habits date back to her Spice Girls days. At the time, she stuck to her classy Spice identity, blowing the entire group’s clothing budget at Gucci and sending other girls shopping at charity stores.
The Beckhams met when David was a promising young player at Manchester United, but Victoria had already established herself as a global pop name.
“She was much richer than I was,” David said, revealing that it was his wife who actually bought the house in Hertfordshire, England, nicknamed “Beckingham Palace.”
But Shins really went off the rails when she tried to run her business.
“It was a very dark time because I lost almost everything. I cried every day before I went to work,” she said on the show.
“The situation was getting worse and worse. It was like a snowball going down the mountain. There was a lot of waste,” she admits.
“We reviewed the amount of money we had invested… It made me panic. There was no sign of anything coming back, so I panicked,” David added at the time.
But in November 2017, private equity firm Neo Investment Partners, led by David Belhassen, bought Victoria’s stake in the brand, giving Victoria a $40 million cash increase. On the show, Belhassen calls the business at the time a “disaster.”
The Beckhams’ joint fortune is now reported to be $671 million, according to the Sunday Times’ billionaires list. The couple and Neo each pumped another $8.3 million into the business in August as losses widened to almost $6.71 million despite a surge in sales last year.
Despite everything, David says: “We always agreed to support each other no matter what…”
And the show, like David’s 2023 documentary series Beckham, reveals Victoria’s sly and dry sense of humor.
The coupe begins with the couple preparing to join King Charles and Queen Camilla at a lavish dinner in February. (A few months later, David would be knighted in Charles’ birthday honors list.)
When David offers his wife a “chocolate bar,” she snorts and says, “I haven’t had chocolate since the ’90s. I’m going to stop now.”
After a hugely successful show in Paris, which was attended by the entire family, including their now estranged son Brooklyn, the cameras cut to the Beckhams at their home in the Cotswolds.
“You don’t have to prove (anything) to me, ever,” David tells her. “Let’s face it, you can make a cheese sandwich, and we’re proud of you.”
Victoria responds with tears in her eyes: “To be honest, I’ve never been very good at making cheese sandwiches.”
