“It’s not about him, it’s about me,” declares Victoria Beckham (“him” being her husband Sir David Beckham).
And that’s exactly what we get in a new three-part documentary, which drops on Netflix on Thursday.
The former Spice Girl and fashion entrepreneur, 51, is determined to tell her own story – two years after former England captain Sir David, 50, released his own, hugely successful TV series.
The episodes take us inside Victoria’s pop career, family life, struggles to reinvent herself and preparation for a major show at Paris Fashion Week.
We also learn about the serious financial troubles her fashion business faced, and how she feared she might “lose everything”.
There are contributions from famous friends including Eva Longoria, and fashion titans such as Dame Anna Wintour and Donatella Versace.
Here are our main takeaways from her documentary.
Lady Beckham achieved dizzying fame in the Spice Girls, so it’s hard to believe that at school, she was “that uncool kid” who didn’t fit in.
“I was definitely a loner at school”, she says, explaining she was bullied.
The Spice Girls came together in 1994, after Mel B, Mel C, Emma Bunton, Geri Halliwell and Victoria responded to an advert for candidates.
After the release of their chart-topping debut single Wannabe in 1996, “Spice mania” swept the planet, with their self-styled “Girl Power” mantra – a brand of female empowerment that made them a global pop culture phenomenon.
Lady Beckham credits her bandmates for making her “more lighthearted, more fun” and says it was the first time she felt popular.
She still had to face negative headlines about her weight, and discusses having an eating disorder. She says she never talked about it publicly, or even very much with her parents, but that it made her become “very good at lying”.
But Lady Beckham says the other Spice Girls made her “feel good enough” about being herself. It’s a message she continues to instil in her daughter Harper, 14.
“I tell Harper every day, be who you are,” she says.
Geri Halliwell left the Spice Girls in 1998 and the group split up in 2001.
Lady Beckham says she found the transition “really, really difficult”.
She carried on making music, but the criticism she received “really hurt”.
Then came the infamous WAG period. Pictures of Victoria and other wives-and-girlfriends supporting their footballer partners in the German town of Baden-Baden in 2006 were plastered all over the tabloids.
“It was fun,” says Lady Beckham of that time in her life.
But she now concedes there was an “element of attention seeking” to it all. “I was trying to find myself, I felt incomplete, sad, frozen in time maybe,” she says.
After the family moved to the US, Lady Beckham decided she wanted to work in fashion.
But to do that, she knew she had to shed her other personas – the Spice Girl, the WAG. “I buried those boobs in Baden-Baden,” she says.
Victoria ‘almost lost everything’ in struggles with fashion business
Lady Beckham is strikingly honest about the struggles her fashion business faced.
She says people didn’t see her as “cool at all”, and that a lot of people refused to take her seriously.
And Vogue giant Dame Anna cements that view, when she says of Victoria’s fashion aspirations: “I thought maybe this was a hobby. I didn’t quite believe it.”
We see the growth of Victoria Beckham Ltd but also the serious financial troubles it faced. Sir David says he didn’t think her business would survive, while Lady Beckham agrees.
“I almost lost everything and that was a dark, dark time,” she says. “I used to cry before I went to work every day because I felt like a firefighter.”
She says her firm was “tens of millions in the red”.
In a later scene, her voice breaks, and she wells up in tears, when she recalls how Sir David stepped in to help her business out.
But the series also shows her turn things around, and we see her pull out all the stops in the run-up to her triumphant Spring/Summer show at Paris Fashion Week in September 2024.
Supermodel Gigi Hadid walked for her, wearing a striking emerald green gown. Dame Anna is shown in attendance, and, in an earlier clip, says Lady Beckham “totally proved us wrong”.
Today, Victoria’s business has offices in London and New York, with its flagship store in Mayfair, London. The brand’s products are in 230 stores across 50 countries around the world, according to the company’s website.