She has been famous for 28 years, first as a Spice Girl, then as a Wag to David Beckham, and more recently as a fashion designer and the mother of four children who are also famous.
No wonder it sometimes feels like there’s nothing we don’t know about Victoria Beckham, who turns 50 today. Yet even someone as oh-so-scrutinised as Posh has secrets…
1. She can be starstruck, and her favourite celebrity meeting was with Sex And The City’s Sarah Jessica Parker, who was ‘lovely, warm, funny and stylish — and a wonderful mother’.
The original SATC remains Victoria’s ‘favourite ever’ TV show.
2. Before Becks, she was engaged to electrician Mark Wood, who worked for her father’s electronics supply business.
They lived together in the family home in Hertfordshire, and he popped the question in 1994, when she was 20, but split two years later. She said: ‘For some reason we got engaged.
He was an alarm engineer. If only he’d stayed in the cupboard that I met him in at my mum’s house.’
3. She is superstitious: ‘I don’t walk under a ladder. If I see a magpie, I salute.’
4. Her brother, Christian, and sister, Louise, both have four children each, just like Victoria and David who have Brooklyn, 25, Romeo, 21, Cruz, 19, and Harper, 12.
5. Chris Herbert — who set up the Spice Girls with his father Bob — recalls that Victoria’s vocal audition to join the band earned her a ranking of only five out of ten.
6. When they were househunting for a family home before their 1999 wedding, Victoria proved ruthless. Her rival was Chris Evans, then the best paid DJ in the UK. ‘We have been looking at the same houses. I said to my estate agent: “Anything he’s looking at, I want to see it first.”‘
7. Her favourite colour is ‘sunset orange’.
8. There is a Former Friends Club which includes Stella McCartney and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. McCartney was angered when Victoria nicked her nanny and two of the staff at her fashion label, and she and Meghan drifted apart post-Megxit.
9. She travelled with her own entourage on the 2007 Spice Girls reunion tour. Geri and Victoria clashed during the tour, with sources saying Posh’s habit of being constantly on her phone to David or fashion friends such as ‘Donatella’ (Versace) got up everyone’s noses.
10. In 1999, after Brooklyn’s birth, she swiftly dropped her baby weight and surprisingly agreed to be weighed on television. The scales showed that she weighed just 8st.
11. She is still close to her best friend from school, Maria-Louise Featherstone, whom she met aged four. Maria-Louise, a former make-up artist, helped her to settle in Los Angeles in 2007 and was reputedly behind the mahogany spray tan she loved in the mid-2000s.
12. Fergie, Duchess of York, was among the guests at an amazingly vulgar pre-World Cup 2005 party at Beckingham Palace, which was filmed for ITV.
13. Husband David and son Brooklyn are keen cooks, but not Victoria. Harper remarks, ‘Mummy, you can’t even make cereal’ and points out that her chicken Kiev comes from M&S. Victoria once said her ‘most popular’ dish for the children was a mango carved into a hedgehog.
14. She underwent ‘several’ fertility treatments while hoping to get pregnant with youngest child, Harper, due to polycystic ovary syndrome.
15. In the early days, she called herself Victoria ‘Aadams’ as she thought the double A would help her name to stand out. She also used the name Victoria Adams Wood in some early merchandise, Wood being the name of her first serious boyfriend.
16. She insisted on creating an ‘Audrey Hepburn room’ at ‘Beckingham Palace’ in Sawbridgeworth, Herts, as she idolises the actress. It was a black and white Audrey-themed bathroom.
17. Her date to Elton John’s 2005 civil partnership in Windsor with David Furnish was not David, but her hairdresser, Ben Cooke. He also went on a yacht holiday with her and David around this time, and fixed their complex hairstyles. ‘If we went ashore, I made sure they were looking fabulous,’ he said.
18. David isn’t the only one who has been the subject of a ‘kiss and tell’. Victoria said: ‘My dad opened the paper one day to find that one of my ex-boyfriends had sold a story about me having sex with him on a train, and as rock ‘n’ roll as it sounded, and as much as I’d have loved for it to be true, it was actually very untrue.’
19. Lunch is now always fish and steamed veg — but as a teenager it was McDonald’s. Katy Regan, who attended the Laine Theatre Arts school in Epsom with ‘Vicks’ at 16, says the ‘pretty olive-skinned girl with teenage spots and highlighted hair’ would join the rest of the gang for a burger lunch.
20. She has a least favourite look: the ‘torpedo bazookas’ and blonde crop from the time she moved to LA. ‘Absolutely no’ she says now of that haircut.
21. Kelly Hoppen — the Empress of Beige — was hired to give the Beckhams’ Beverly Hills home a touch of class. Their Holland Park house was interior designed by Rose Uniacke, who is wed to Harry Potter film director David Heyman. Hoppen was apparently put out not to be asked.
22. Her current ‘best friend’ is American hairdresser Ken Paves, who is Harper’s godfather and travels with her. ‘He is a genius,’ she says. Actress Eva Longoria, also a very close friend, introduced them.
23. Mel B, Mel C, Emma and Geri fell out viciously with Victoria and manager Simon Fuller in the spring of 2018 as they tried to put together another reunion tour. Mel B was so cross she sent a text message saying: ‘F*** off you bitch.’ She later dressed as Victoria for Halloween. They have since made up.
24. The late fashion designer Alexander McQueen detested and openly mocked her. A biography of designer John Galliano says McQueen banned Victoria from coming to his show in 2005. Imogen Edwards-Jones, author of Fashion Babylon, said: ‘Never underestimate the intense snobbery there is in the fashion world. You are either in it or out — and she was out.’
25. Victoria was the only group member not to sing a solo track during the Spice Girls 2007 reunion tour.
26. Her current favourite car is a £227,000 Ferrari Roma Blu Pozzi which she uses when in London. She was previously ‘creative director’ for Range Rover and lent her name to a special edition Evoque which came with a four-piece matching leather luggage set.
27. A clean living enthusiast, she nevertheless loves to drink a glass or two of (very expensive) red wine. She also loves hot sake.
28. Manager Simon Fuller was bought out of David’s business, Beckham Brand Holdings, in 2019, but he remains a major shareholder and a board member of Victoria’s fashion company, which he helped her to set up in 2008. He is not involved in its day-to-day operations.
29. She posed for pictures with her OBE in 2017 on her own. David had been stung by the reporting of remarks about his quest for a knighthood, having apparently called the honours committee ‘unappreciative c****’ in a leaked email.
30. Victoria’s favourite perfume is by specialist perfumier Vilhelm. Called Room Service, it costs £220 a bottle.
31. She may have named her daughter Harper, born in 2011, after the character Harper Finkle in The Wizards Of Waverly Place, which her sons loved. David later said it was in honour of Harper Lee, author of his wife’s ‘favourite book’ To Kill A Mockingbird.
32. In an interview in 2005, Victoria said she had never read a book in her life. However, recently, she said she had read — and loved — Matt Haig’s novel, How To Stop Time.
33. As a teenager, Victoria struggled with acne and was self-conscious about her weight and believed this was why she was put at the back of the end-of-year show at her stage school.
34. Singer Pepi Lemer helped Victoria ‘find her voice’, as she had had no vocal training before the Spice Girls. Lemer, who had Victoria practise vocal scales, tuning, breathing and projection, said: ‘She wasn’t a natural singer. She had to be trained so she could blend in with the others and form a group.’
35. Victoria attended the gripping Men’s Wimbledon Final in 2012 and looked bored to tears as Andy Murray lost to Roger Federer. Her manager, Simon Fuller, was also Murray’s manager.
36. The Beckhams’ Cotswolds house — David’s favourite — is near celebrity haunt Soho Farmhouse, with the staff sometimes walking the Beckhams’ dogs and sending over food and cocktails for the family.
37. She is a crystal devotee and likes to hold them to relax. She said: ‘My first crystal was a black obsidian (right) and I still carry it everywhere. I like to surround myself with positive energy, and so often have a little collection of crystals in my handbag.’
38. Unusually for a fashion designer, Victoria cannot draw designs or cut a pattern. In an interview she said: ‘We have fit models we work with, and we’ll either work the fit model or we’ll drape on a stand. I can draw, but badly. I think that’s OK. No one’s expecting me to do it the normal way.’
39. For her 1999 wedding in Ireland, Victoria commissioned and wore a gold and diamond coronet-style tiara by Irish jewellery designer Slim Barrett, but didn’t opt to buy it after the ceremony. Barrett put it up for auction in 2013, but it failed to meet its reserve price, with bidding stopping at £14,000.
40. Victoria flew in her own medical team, including Dr Malcolm Gillard, when Cruz was born by Caesarean section in Madrid. Dr Gillard was not allowed to take charge by Spanish law, but Victoria wanted him there for support. He previously delivered Brooklyn and Romeo at London’s Portland Hospital.
41. She and David attended the weddings of both Prince William and Prince Harry. In 2011, David was so thrilled to have been invited to a royal wedding that he wore his OBE on the wrong lapel to Kate and William’s nuptials at Westminster Abbey.
42. The story goes that designer Tom Ford called up his PR in London to yell about Victoria: ‘Get that woman out of my clothes!’ in the early 2000s. The PR declared she couldn’t, because ‘that woman’ was buying them.
43. Posh is a big fan of musical theatre — even though the Spice Girls musical, Viva Forever, was a flop in 2012. Director Judy Craymer said: ‘When we opened Mamma Mia!, Victoria came about 18 times. She told me she had always wanted to be the White Cat in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical] Cats.’
44. Victoria bought shoes with her first pay cheque from the Spice Girls — white Patrick Cox Wannabe loafers. ‘I queued up outside Patrick Cox on a Saturday afternoon with my sister,’ she said.
45. Fruit is rationed in her diet because she says it makes her ‘bloat’.
46. When she launched her eponymous fashion line in 2008, she made one-on-one appointments with the editors of British magazines in a private suite at Claridge’s hotel. A source says: ‘She went straight to the top and held meetings, without even her publicist present.’ Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour was her key target.
47. As a young girl she could juggle and do the splits.
48. She joined with David to flog the cheap and cheerful ‘Intimately’ by Coty perfume in 2010. The female version has since been discontinued. She now sells fragrances through her Victoria Beckham fashion label.
49. Her favourite snack is seaweed rice cakes.
50. There was an embarrassing incident at the British Fashion Awards in 2011 when Kate Moss declined to pose for a picture with Victoria inside the event. Moss agreed only after designer Marc Jacobs had intervened.
