From the moment she unveiled her spring/summer 09 debut, Victoria Beckham has built a wardrobe that modern women want to wear. “It’s about making women feel great and celebrating them,” she explained to i-D last season after her ten-year anniversary homecoming show. “It’s about dressing not only our woman, but our women.” After refining her house codes — fluid lines, a mix of masculine and feminine, the odd playful print, an arresting mix of unusual colours, and the ability to surprise — she presented an autumn/winter collection she described as “an A-Z of a woman’s life”.
“I’ve been thinking about what women want, about modern femininity and about how to curate those ideas into a collection for today,” Victoria Beckham explained post-show. “Our woman tells a story through each of the looks. She embraces our signature silhouettes, both fitted and softer, clothes that are wearable but still have the ability to let us dream.” In 2019, her modern woman can be anything and have everything. “There’s almost a cinematic mood, an elevation, a character embedded within a narrative. She’s proper but she’s definitely not prim. You can feel a sense of her life through the clothes that she wears.”
There’s lots of colour, lots of pattern. The palette is strong, with jolts of absinthe green and lipstick red alongside waxy colours, lilac, dusty pink, pale teal. Texture abound in tweeds, wools and silks — matched and mismatched. Boots are high-heeled, to the knee or thigh, closed or open-toed. An archive-inspired chain pattern features both literally and in the abstract. From the office-leading opening look of a checked suit-skirt, red long collar blouse and knitted, leopard-print thigh-high boots to the appropriated men’s coats and the evening-owning 70s-infused looks, this collection was a celebration of inherent femininity.
“There are touches of retro, pinches of the 70s, yet it’s all brought together into something encapsulating what we call the modern feminine alphabet,” Beckham explained. “It’s a vocabulary of dressing for now.” As a number of designers attempt to dress the “Old Céline” Philophiles, Beckham emphasised her credentials as one of the female design forces to stan in 2019.
