Camryn Rosenstein
Contributing Writer
Formerly “Posh Spice,” Victoria Beckham has come a long way from her ’90s music career to the debut of her fashion collection 10 years ago. Beckham has come full circle this season as she had her London Fashion Week debut this past weekend. Throughout her fashion-designing career, she has continued to keep her collections feminine and romantic with hints of masculinity and sophistication and just the right touch of her British roots. This season’s collection is no exception to the look she has cultivated for her tremendously successful brand. Assuming she had a lot on the line, considering her first fashion week show in London, I am sure that there was an everpresent amount of pressure surrounding her and her team within the weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds leading up to the highly anticipated event.
During Beckham’s “Spice Girls” days, she was known for her mini skirts, her tight little black dresses and her patent leather heeled boots. Since the beginnings of her fashion line, she can be recoginized for her feminine tailoring in long lined blazers, wide-leg high-rise trousers and lace-trimmed blouses. However, in her newest collection, Beckham mixes her Posh Spice style of form-fitting pieces with traditional English tailoring infused with aspects of British street style such as layering. Additionally, Beckham’s color scheme, which includes black, red, beige, white, gray, pink, blue and gold, reflects the way she has fused together her past and present style by mixing the colors and using different shades of the same color.
A look that Beckham masters in her current collection is the slim fitting silk slip dress with her signature oversized blazer, but this season she experiments a bit with different patterns and fabrics to expand her range. It is interesting to note her stylistic choice for this collection considering it is the Spring/Summer Collection, because several of the pieces include long sleeves or long pants. In knowing that she would be showing this collection in London, I think Beckham made such stylistic decisions based on the inconsistent weather of London. Many of the items are transitional, which creates a versatility in the outfits that many contemporary designers include in their collections.
Over the last decade, Beckham has evolved into one of the most sought-after designers in the world, generating an average of 60 million British pounds in annual sales. Beckham continues to find success in the fashion world because she has created a style that is uniquely her own but is mainstream enough that she reaches a huge consumer audience. Many fashion designers have a hard time finding a balance between what they want to see in their designs and what their consumer wants to buy. In this new collection, Beckham tests out some new silhouettes that created new shapes and dimensions from her past collections. Beckham’s choice to test out these new styles shows how she is thinking about the fast-paced, always changing fashion industry and how she must take risks to prove that she can adapt to the fashion world while staying true to the style she has cultivated for her brand during the 10 years she has been in the business.