Victoria Beckham’s Girlhood Glamour
Anders Christian Madsen reviews the Victoria Beckham Spring/Summer 2026 collection.
As part of the documentary she is releasing on October 9, Victoria Beckham spent the last year going through her parents’ archives of photos and footage from her upbringing. “I was reacquainted with all this imagery from my teenage years that I hadn’t seen for so long. I noticed how I was finding my voice, back then, through clothing,” she said during a preview. Mirrored in the stage her own teenage daughter Harper is going through, it made Beckham think of the role that clothes play during our rite of passage: “How it helps shape our sense of identity as we go from girlhood into womanhood,” as she put it.
Presented in Val-de-Grâce, the collection was a sensitive and romantic image of the coming-of-age wardrobe. Beckham, whose recent collections have studied the ritual of dressing, captured a young woman’s dress-up sessions in variations of silky undergarments and the way girls will often just wear them as normal clothes. Employing the abstraction which is always part of her runway collections, Beckham used elements of crinolines— the ultimate symbol of girly dress-up— to transform the undergarments into new silhouettes, stiffening the frames of bustiers and the hems of little cami shorts.
The brand’s signature slip dresses were imbued with signs of wear like creasing and erosion. “It’s the idea of that stage when you’re old enough to wear nice clothes but still too young not to mess them up,” Beckham said. “It gives the garments a sense of being lived-in: it adds character.” Similarly, tops and dresses were covered in feathers used as an element symbolic of teenage dress-up, and “a childlike way of decorating yourself, like when you pick up a feather and spontaneously put it in your hair,” she said. (Feathers are a constant element in this designer’s weekend life due to the chicken coops she and David Beckham keep in the country.)
VICTORIA BECKHAM
Tailoring that evoked the girly way of appropriating inherited pieces that perhaps look a little bit too grown-up for them cut through the prettiness of the collection and cemented the masculine handsomeness that also defines the Victoria Beckham brand. The same spirit ran through big lumberjack shirts and oversized parkas bonded with shirts. “It’s also the idea of trying to make something casual more formal, when you’re trying to grow up,” she said.
Beckham had been watching coming-of-age masterpieces like The Virgin Suicides and Romeo + Juliet during her creative process. The film that’s no doubt most on her mind this week is the Netflix documentary about her brand and life that comes out on Thursday. Centered around her Spring/Summer 2025 show, it will reflect how far Beckham has come not just in life but with the brand she’s built for nearly two decades now. Her collection may have been inspired by the stage in life where our identity is still evolving, but her show had all the confidence of a brand on top of its game.
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