She feels so free: Victoria Beckham enters her roaring ‘20s
For Spring-Summer 2027, Victoria Beckham looked to the liberated lines of the 1920s, translating a new sense of ease into fluid dresses, lean tailoring and movement-led construction. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
A couple of weeks ago, The Financial Times reported that Victoria Beckham’s fashion business had turned its first operating profit, with revenues rising to nearly £130 million. It was a big deal for the designer, who traced the struggles that have gone into building her brand in a Netflix documentary last year. Perhaps that’s why her collection this season felt like a sigh of relief. Literally, Beckham loosened her normally so 1930s silhouette into the freer form associated with the 1920s. “Effortlessness has always been so important in my work, and it gets more important as the brand evolves. No matter how complex the design is, the garment has to be easy to wear: effortlessly flattering,” she said in a preview. “
So, I was drawn to silhouettes that felt effortless, liberated, free. It took me to the 1920s.” Staged in the Conciergerie, the show opened with ball-beaded dresses with a print of a floral hand-painting. It was a new silhouette for Beckham: a new sense of ease. “They’re like putting on a vest. I love that about them,” she said of the dresses backstage, as her husband David handed her a glass of Grands Échézeaux Grand Cru from 2014. The 1920s sensibility echoed in long dresses constructed as if a piece of ribbon had intercepted the silhouette and made its way around the form, nipping and tucking it and eventually tying it up into a bow. They reflected the duality Beckham talked about: “Even when there’s quite a complicated construction, it has to feel easy. I want everything to be elevated – we’re in Paris! – but it’s rooted in reality.”
In her 1920s research, Beckham – who grew up on dance and musical theatre – looked into the decade’s discovery of modern dance. “It was a time when modern forms of ballet and dance really started to emerge. Dancers were freeing themselves from rules and constrictions, just like women were in their wardrobes,” she said. “It inspired these loose, easy silhouettes, created with elaborate technique.” The motif also manifested in knitwear and bodies informed by the dancer’s wardrobe, and in tailoring that had a ballet-centric leanness about it; shape-enhancing but never constricting.
Towards the end of the show, Beckham challenged her own idea of liberation. “I wanted to see if I could express freedom in something rigid as well. We looked at paper dolls and the way their clothes move on their ‘body’: how they’re almost loose,” she said. The notion came to life in starched cotton fan dresses that danced on the models’ bodies as they walked down the runway. “They are rigid but underneath, the body is free,” Beckham pointed out. After climbing the mountain of building her brand for the last two decades, the relief – the feeling of freedom – that comes with making it across the ridge of profitability was palpable chez VB.
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