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Victoria Beckham, Working Girl - for Times Magazine

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David does the cooking? “Yes, he’s really good,” his wife said. When David was playing soccer in Italy a few years ago, she explained, the family was living in L.A., and he was left alone on his days off. “So he decided to go to culinary school.”


This is a long article so just some excerpts:

She knows her product intimately — she often says she designs clothes that she herself fantasizes about wearing — and they reflect her tastes: nothing busy, very few prints, color used sparingly, lots of calm clean grays, creams, navys, blacks. Her first collection evoked the work of Roland Mouret, one of whose dresses she made famous when she wore it to David’s official introduction ceremony with the Los Angeles Galaxy, but she has gradually acquired a new boldness, the confidence to find her own style. Her current collection for fall is widely considered one of the standouts of the season, with masculine-influenced coats, long hemlines and skirts and trousers that skim the body rather than cling to it.

Beckham’s ready-to-wear collection is still purposely small, but she is thinking big. She has branched out into sunglasses, handbags and denim. She has started a younger, less expensive line, Victoria, Victoria Beckham, which features clothes that are less tailored, more casual, more colorful. She has taken her brand global and is expanding most rapidly in the Asian markets, particularly China. Her company, based in Battersea, south London, already employs 90 workers, and is due to expand its office space soon. It recently started an e-commerce site, and there is talk of opening the first Victoria Beckham stand-alone store, in central London.

Here she is at the center of all this, a tiny dynamo in skyscraper heels who gives off an aura of calm — how real it is is anyone’s guess — while everything spins around her. Her ambition is endless. “I want to reach as many women throughout the world as I can,” she said. “There are more categories that I want to enter into. I have five categories at the moment. But at some point I would love to do shoes, I would love to do fragrance, I would love to do makeup, I would like to do underwear. There are so many things I want to do.”

At the moment, though, it was time to eat lunch. (Yes, she eats, though on the other hand she spends a large chunk of time each day doing a Tracy Anderson workout with a personal trainer.) We moved to the table. On one wall was a huge collage-y Julian Schnabel; on another, a David Beckham original: a blown-up black-and-white photograph of the four children bouncing together on a bed. The house is a rental, and Beckham said she missed Los Angeles, where the family lived most recently — the climate, the openness, the work ethic. “I am very career minded, and I think my personality is more suited to America,” she said. “I am a working mum.”

Lunch — corn soup followed by a salad of greens and fruit for Beckham; sushi for Beckham’s assistant and me; and a fruit platter for everyone — was prepared and served by a chef. “You are going to think this is real — this is what I get every day!” Beckham said. But it is not, apparently. “Chris” — that is the chef — “comes in a couple of days a week and might make a giant lasagna so I can put it in the freezer and then do it myself,” Beckham said. “David does the cooking.”

Beckham said that she has never missed a birthday, and that it is important to her to keep the children grounded and unspoiled. Both she and David come from close, hard-working families: David’s father was a gas-company engineer, and hers was an electrical wholesaler. She contrasted her attitude toward that of some of their friends in L.A.

“We have what I consider to be normal birthday parties,” she said.“I’ve been to parties in L.A. that are mind-blowing. I mean, quite literally mind-blowing. People get cellphones in the party bag, that sort of thing. Fabulous, fabulous parties. Ours aren’t like that. They are normal kids’ parties. We’ll have a bouncy castle, a face painter.”

Teller has shot Beckham before. He was responsible for the witty 2008 Marc Jacobs ads in which, among other things, she lay inside a shopping bag, with only her splayed legs visible — and she appreciates his no-fuss approach. “Normally in a fashion shoot you’d be plastered in makeup, in amazing clothes,” she said. “I find it embarrassing when you don’t look like yourself, when you’ve had tons of retouching.”

At the same time, Beckham is incredibly controlling of her image. Even in supposedly candid photographs, she is invariably shown posing as if she were on the red carpet: one leg in front of the other, body leaning back so that her hips jut forward and emphasize the slenderness of her form.

She never smiles — it is almost as if someone once told her that she looks better scowling — and instead affects a mien of distant hauteur that can come across as snobbishness but in person reads more like shyness and insecurity.

“I dunno,” she said, when asked about the no-smiling phenomenon. “I smile in family pictures.” Perhaps, she mused, the reputation she got for being moody during the Spice era stuck. Also, she said, “When you’re in a position to be paparazzi-ed just walking down the street, you’d look a little daft if you were smiling all the time.” (Apparently, the eternally sunny-seeming Kate Middleton never got that particular memo).

For the shoot, Beckham reclined on her office floor, surrounded by fashion chaos: swatches of fabric, soda cans, sketches. She declined the suggestion to include a plate of grapes or some such in the picture. “We don’t want anyone to know I eat,” she said. “Why ruin that?”

They work well together, she said, and then began talking without irony about the brand — the brand she and David have fashioned together, along with Simon Fuller, creator of “American Idol”— as if being part of a brand was the most normal thing in the world, as if that is simply what people do.

“You know, we don’t look at it as a big brand,” she said. “It is, but it happened very, very naturally. It seems that now everybody wants to make a brand; everybody wants to build a brand. Ours happened very organically.” And then she said: “The most important thing is each other and the children.”

The Beckham brand is one thing; the Victoria Beckham brand is another. “I just wanted to create beautiful clothes, good quality clothes I wanted to wear myself,” she said. “And then I wanted to create handbags, because I couldn’t find the right handbag that I wanted to carry. Then I couldn’t find the right sunglasses, so I decided to make my own sunglasses.”

There is no stopping her. “I want to get bigger and bigger,” she said. “I absolutely want an empire.”

Entire article at source

it's worth a read. love her. sorry about the source, mods.

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