Designer A-Z

Victoria by Victoria Beckham

Autumn/Winter 2012

By Rebecca Lowthorpe

In her second outing of the week, Victoria Beckham —this time sitting with her audience, in the form of an intimate salon style presentation and bouncing Harper on her knee—talked us through her Victoria line.

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‘We launched last season and the response was quite breathtaking,’ she said. ‘Gurgle,’ replied Harper.

‘I just wanted to give my customers what they love, so it’s girlie, fresh, that kind of personality. This really is the other side of my wardrobe,’ she continued.

‘Gurgle-hic,’ cooed Harper.

Victoria—always the best advert for her brand—was, as ever, immaculate, in a loose navy dress with a crisp white collar printed either side with a small white swan. The other prints in the collection—named ‘Frockerella’, a charming series of illustrations of all the dresses in the collection, and ‘Collarful’, dainty drawings of collars, looked sweetly sophisticated. As did the ‘school girl kind of attitude’, with shorter, drop-waist, kick-pleat skirts, in deep red and navy or subtle sheeny striped jacquards for those little collar-and-cuff dresses, all worn with short black ankle socks and towering black suede banana-shaped heels—a collaboration with Walter Steiger. It was nice to see her in demure mode, too, with the smooth longer length dresses – again, cut with the same VB precision for which she is fast becoming known—they looked fresh and utterly in sync with all the other high-flying catwalks here in New York.

It’s safe to say that every style will be snapped up. The stores went doolally for the lower-priced Victoria line when it launched last season—Harvey Nics and Net a Porter apparently couldn’t get hold of the stuff fast enough. ‘It blew me away,’ said Beckham, ‘In one week we had Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams and Celine Buckens (the British 15-year-old War Horse actress), all wearing it, all these women of different ages and all chic in their own way.’

So what if there were only dresses, 20 in all—no need for trousers, jackets or knitwear in Victoria World. ‘Focus,’ she stressed, after the presentation, now swinging Harper to and fro, ‘is the word of the week.’