Blend It Like Beckham

AIR When Victoria Beckham invited India Knight round for tea to discuss her bestselling make-up range, nothing was off limits. From ageing to diet to Harper’s love of contouring — find out what happened when two beauty obsessives got together

WORDS: INDIA KNIGHT

Victoria Beckham really loves beauty. She has been a fanatical make-up and skincare nerd since her teens, and still is — which is how I have ended up sitting here, in her lovely house in a lovely street in a lovely part of London, talking about the fact that David has never seen her without her eyebrows drawn on. (More of that later.) Turns out she reads my column in The Sunday Times ’ Style magazine, hence the invitation to discuss her nerdery, which is, by the way, completely unfeigned.

Back in 2016, before she launched her own brand, Estée Lauder approached Beckham to work on a collaboration. They were probably imagining that she would lend her name and face to whatever product they came up with.

“I thought, my God. This is all my Christmases come at once,” she says. “It was the absolute dream. I was beyond excited. We were living in Los Angeles and they came over for a meeting. I’m pretty sure they expected it to just be a cup of tea and to say, ‘Hey, shall we do a lip gloss in nude?’ But I had an entire dining room table — it was really big — full of all the make-up I’d loved over the years, all laid out, including old lip pencils that were tiny, tiny little stubs. God knows what they must have been thinking. I said, ‘My idea is that I create what I can’t find.’ There was this discontinued Calvin Klein illuminating cream from about 20 years before that I absolutely loved and wanted to recreate. It eventually became Morning Aura.”

It quickly became obvious that there was an appetite for Victoria Beckham beauty products. “So after properly educating myself I decided to really go for it, to build the brand myself, without the constraints of a partner,” she says.

“My investors were very supportive.” She has everything to do with every aspect of the brand; she goes to her office, down the road from the family home, pretty much every day. “Look, some people are singers or actresses or models and they happen to have a licence deal where they’re going to put their name to make-up, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But, for me, this is what I do every single day. I split my time between the fashion and the beauty. I’m not a singer. I’m not doing anything else. This and fashion are my job.”

Her fashion line, launched in 2008, finally turned a profit last year, with revenues up 42 per cent to £58 million ($73 million). Her private equity investor said that, but for Covid, it would have been in the black two years earlier. The beauty line was profitable “after a year”, according to Beckham. Beauty lines often fund their fashion siblings; she says, “We’re one and the same company. Fashion has had its challenges, so the fact that we have turned a profit is very exciting.”

The make-up nerdery combined with her work ethic — “I spend so much time working with the team [who are based in New York; she’s on Zoom a lot], I am a complete pain in the neck. I am across absolutely everything, from formulas to the size of pigments” — means that Victoria Beckham Beauty is one of the few celebrity make-up offerings that is really respected by the industry. It is genuinely great, to the point where the Victoria Beckhamness of it is almost not the point. Beckham herself says she is most pleased when people buy the products despite, rather than because of, her.

I always think there’s something quite French about the brand: it’s pared back and chic, everything works beautifully without requiring much effort or skill, and all of it, from the lovely tortoiseshell packaging to the product, is effective but understated. It’s the make-up equivalent of a perfect trench coat or optimally mussed hair. “Thank you, that’s such a compliment,” she says. “I want it all to be easy and effortless — more considered than you might think, but easy.”

There’s something vaguely French about the way she looks too, as if an unpouty, more impish Parisienne with longer hair was transported to west London. She is immaculately made-up, all her own work, using her own products: great skin, healthy glow, excellent brows and her trademark daytime smoky eye.

I’m told by a mutual acquaintance that the design of the house we are in involved the interiors genius Rose Uniacke, which makes sense. It’s entirely elegant, but also friendly and warm: flooded with light, pared down but full of colour and art, with deep velvet sofas and generously proportioned furniture. We chat in the dining area adjoining the open kitchen, at a huge, really beautiful wooden table, tactile and organic-feeling with weighty upholstered benches on either side. The actual kitchen makes me almost convulse with envy: it is glorious (an inky blue, since you ask) but full of kitchen things, and alive rather than for show. The whole vibe is considered but unstiff. You can tell a lot about someone by their flower arrangements, and Beckham’s are artlessly wild, as if picked barefoot at dawn in the Platonic ideal of an English garden. You can imagine children in the house, and dogs. (The family has five: three cocker spaniels, a German shepherd and a cavapoo, and lovingly ferry them back and forth between London and their house in the Cotswolds. There was a rabbit that commuted too, belonging to her 11-year-old daughter, Harper, but “we decided to leave the rabbit in the country because it was getting bigger and we had a lot of animals in the car every Friday”, Beckham says.) The table is laden with anything you might conceivably want for a late breakfast including four different sorts of strawberries, but the idea of tucking in while VB perches lithely on the bench is impossible — she is tiny, the skinniest person I’ve ever met, though fit-thin rather than “oh dear” thin: the overall impression is of a body that is strong and over which she has total control. She is also extremely pretty, much more so than in photographs: good bones, gamine, but with something naughty about her, like she might burst out laughing at any time (she is very funny). She has more than 32 million social media followers and can ask them directly what their beauty requirements are or what they think of such and such an idea. She films herself using her products, despite not having any influencer kit. “I have this one window in my country house that gets the best light, so I always stand there. Sometimes people say, ‘Why is she holding her neck like that?’ but I’m like, ‘Well, hang on, I’ve got a phone here, I don’t even have a stand, and I’m trying to do it myself without a mirror!’” There’s no script, no lighting rig, no production. “There’s no one telling me what to do. The beauty team are probably quite surprised when they wake up in New York on Saturday morning and I’ve taken a video myself in my bedroom, though I did have to redo that one because the bed wasn’t made and a story had just come out about David being OCD, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s going to lose his shit if he sees me showing the messy bed David Beckham just got out of. So I redid it and I kind of made the bed. But there’s no one saying, ‘You’ve got to do this. This is the messaging. Read this script,’ which is why the videos are so raw.

“The other day I did one in my bathroom and then I realised there was work going on next door and you could hear the drilling.” (David, FYI, uses VBB serum and moisturiser daily.)

She loves addressing her followers directly, especially when she can demonstrate, for example, how to use a green eye pencil (her Satin Kajal Liner in Olive is the bestselling shade after the brown). “I will overlay it on top of the Signature Smoky Eye Brick, because then I’m not getting too much green. I’m getting green mixed with the brown. I used to think you had to have hazel eyes or blue eyes or grey eyes to wear green, but that’s not true. So I love that I can really engage with my customer and say, ‘Hey, I’m not a make-up artist, clearly not a model, but look — it works.’” She demonstrates a similar trick to me with a bright blue pencil, soon to be launched: how to wear very vivid colour in a subtle way. She has all sorts of good ideas about how to modernise one’s makeup so that it looks current but not like your teenage daughter’s. I get the impression she really thinks about what she wants to make next. “Yes, that’s why I don’t rush anything out — it’s not about me creating hundreds of thousands of products. I’m creating the things I want in my make-up bag.”

Case in point: a forthcoming contour stick, which is thin and precise. “So when I’m out looking for the perfect contour — usually with Harper, who is obsessed with make-up, there isn’t a single product in Sephora or Space NK that she doesn’t know — everything I pick up is just so thick and clumsy. But I want to be able to contour my nose, like this, precisely.” She picks up one of her pencils and demonstrates: perfect contour for the contourfearing, in about 30 seconds. “How on earth are you going to be able to do that with a great big chunky thing?” she says. “Quite often I’ll start with a contour down the nose, on the cheeks and around the eyes, as well. It’s really, really easy with this stick. Me and Harper were doing our research in Miami, where there’s a massive Sephora, and not one of the contour sticks could do this because they’re too big. Also, with this, once you’ve created your look it’s not going to budge. I know for a fact no one’s doing this out there. I’m creating stuff I want to use.”

Harper isn’t allowed out of the house wearing make-up, but “she’s been able to do a full face and contour for quite some time. She’s good at doing it very naturally. Going to Space NK is her favourite treat after school. If she does well in a test I’ll take her to the one down the road — it’s her favourite thing. She’s obsessed.”

Contour aside, Beckham is evangelical about her new BabyBlade brow pencils, also born out of necessity, “because over the years my brows have been so overplucked that if you saw me without it you’d be horrified. David has never seen me without my brows. They’re the first thing I do: wake up, put on the brow. Mine aren’t even, either — they’re sisters, not twins. I’m very self-conscious about the overplucking because brows change your whole face. I remember a make-up artist shaving my eyebrows when I was in the Spice Girls. Shaving my eyebrows! When you’re 22 years old and you’re excited that you’re doing a shoot, you don’t think to say, ‘Oh, hey, how about you don’t shave my eyebrows?’ Then you get to 49 and you’re like, ‘Shit.’ I also did some laser hair removal on my eyebrows. That seemed like a really great thing to do at the time. So to create the perfect brow that once you’ve put it on isn’t moving is so important. I’ve used lots of nice creamy brow pencils over the years but all of them slid off. This doesn’t move.”

She has good skin, which is impressive because she used to suffer from appalling acne. “There was a time when you couldn’t put a pin in between them [the spots],” she says. “It was severe, severe acne. Thankfully I have quite oily skin, so I didn’t scar, even though I used to enjoy a good old pick. I wouldn’t touch them now, obviously. Or put toothpaste on them overnight, remember that? But I didn’t understand about skin back then, or about cleansing properly, and I certainly didn’t understand the importance of what you put not just on your skin but in your body. For me eating correctly is so important. That and hydration.”

Is it true she only eats steamed fish and vegetables? No. Is it trueish?

“I mean, look, I have a strict diet. I have quite an obsessive personality in everything I do, whether it’s beauty, fashion, working out or eating. I am very, very disciplined. But it’s about eating healthy fats, so lots of avocado, fish, vegetables, but some other things too. I know it makes me sound incredibly boring. I don’t eat any sugar unless it’s in a glass of wine.”

I’m curious about what, if anything, she has recently done treatment-wise. “I like to try some laser treatments when I’m in LA, and I do a bit of Collagenwave [a noninvasive skin tightening treatment using radio frequency]. What I have had done, which is quite good, is when they lightly ‘burn’ the underneath of your eyes. It’s not intrusive, there’s no downtime, so it’s not overly dramatic.” She is unlined but doesn’t have Botox — “you tend to get that quite shiny forehead, plus your eyebrows go too high. I’m not trying to turn back the clock. I’m 49 and don’t have a hangup about it. I want to look like a good version of myself, rested and fresh. I think it’s about little things. Same with make-up — it’s about not doing too much, which can be really ageing. I went to an event recently and people had very ‘big’ [overfilled] faces. There are some scary options out there.” How does she feel about ageing?

“I am comfortable with who I am, I accept how I look, I make the best of what I have. I feel, professionally and personally, really accomplished at 49.

I consider how I apply my make-up.

But I like how it feels being older. I wouldn’t want to be 25 again. I was the kind of young woman who would look in the mirror and see what needed to be improved upon, as opposed to what actually looked OK. I’ve always been quite tough on myself, but because of that I’ve also always strived to be the best version of myself. It’s not about changing anything, it’s just about looking at the best version of yourself. I have more muscle tone at 49 than I did at 25. I don’t obsess over it, but I think age shouldn’t stop you from achieving personal goals. You can still look great. You know more about your body, you know what works. I know what I’ve got to do in the gym, I know what I’ve got to eat, I know more about what works on my face. Knowledge is a great thing.”

A new exhibition celebrates the sari as one of today's most important global fashion stories

WORDS: JOHN THATCHER

While the cyclical nature of fashion means it always eats itself to feed ‘new’ trends, some clothing items never fall out of style. Unique among them is the sari, a garment that dates back to the Indus Valley civilisation of around 3200 BC to 2000 BC, evolving through centuries to find itself reinterpreted and reenergised by a new wave of fashionistas across the globe, while remaining ubiquitous across India and South Asia.

In fact, thanks to the young, the sari is currently experiencing “its most rapid reinvention in its history,” suggests Priya Khanchandani, Head of Curatorial at London’s Design Museum and curator of its new exhibition, The Offbeat Sari. “It makes the sari movement one of today’s most important global fashion stories, yet little is known of its true nature beyond South Asia. Women in cities who previously associated the sari with dressing up are transforming it into fresh, radical, everyday clothing that empowers them to express who they are, while designers are experimenting with its materiality by drawing on unbounded creativity.”

Conventionally a single piece of unstitched fabric, the sari is inherently fluid. Adapted in drape and form over millennia, it reflects identity, social class, taste and function across time and geography, and remains an enduring part of life in India today. Yet in recent decades, for many, the sari has been considered traditional, or uncomfortable, as a form of everyday clothing, especially by the young.

“The sari had become less relevant to young people but is now experiencing a renaissance of sorts,” says Khanchandani. “Young people are wearing the sari as a way of expressing their own identity and demonstrating the capacity of the sari to reflect a diverse range of voices and personas like never before. They are also styling the sari with T-shirts, shirts, trainers, and other accessories, wearing it with or without a petticoat and even substituting the petticoat for leggings or trousers. The sari has come to signify a new version of femininity that is empowered and bold.”

The Offbeat Sari shows how designers, wearers and craftspeople are reshaping the ways in which the sari is understood, designed, made, and worn in contemporary urban India. It presents the sari as a site for design innovation, an expression of identity and resistance, and a crafted object layered with new materials. With the sari now used as a canvas for contemporary trends and attitudes, designers in India are experimenting with hybrid forms such as sari gowns, pre-draped saris, and innovative materials including steel. Wearers are embodying the sari as a vessel for dynamism where once it was for pageantry. Individuals are wearing it as an expression of resistance to social norms, and activists are embodying it as an object of protest. Young people in cities – who previously associated the sari with dressing up – can now be found wearing saris and sneakers on their commutes to work.

On display are around 60 saris, carefully selected to showcase exciting designers of varied scale, from growing, global brands to emerging studios. These include the delicate work of designers such as Abraham & Thakore, Raw Mango, Akaaro and NorBlackNorWhite, who have been at the cutting-edge of the sari’s dynamic shift and renewed relevance. Visitors to the exhibition will also see saris that experiment with materials and form, by designers like Amit Aggarwal, HUEMN, Diksha Khanna and Bodice. Then there are examples of couture saris, such as a copy of Tarun Tahiliani’s foil jersey sari for Lady Gaga (2010) and Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla’s ruffled sari worn by Bollywood star Deepika Padukone at Cannes Film Festival in 2022. Additionally, work by Sabyasachi and Anamika Khanna exemplify the sari’s full potential for extravagance, while alongside these is a range of styles seen on the streets of Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and beyond, showing how young women in cities are embracing the sari anew. One significant standout highlighting the garment’s global appeal is the first ever sari worn at last year’s Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Designed by Sabyasachi, and styled with a gold Schiaparelli bodice, the stunning ensemble was worn by Indian businesswoman and socialite Natasha Poornawalla, and made headlines for its dramatic mix of Indian and Western couture. “I interpreted the dress code, Gilded Glamour, with an Indian gaze that revels in our multiculturalism and the authenticity of our design, aesthetic and craft legacies,” said its colourful designer. The timely exhibition unfolds across three main sections: ‘Transformations’ highlights the work of the designers in India who have fuelled the experimentation of recent years, by pushing the boundaries of the sari through the creation of new genres and embracing it as an object of playful expression. Highlights include a sari adorned with sequins cut from disused X-ray images obtained from hospital waste by Abraham & Thakore, a distressed denim sari by Diksha Khanna, and a lacquered sari drape wrapped around a plinth in a form of a conceptual play on the traditional garment by contemporary artist, Bharti Kher.

‘Identity and Resistance’ considers the role of the wearer in reforming the sari today, exploring how the sari can become a vessel for conveying individual identities, with a focus on India within the broader context of South Asia. Visitors will see the immense capacity of the sari to reflect a diverse range of voices and personas, how it can empower the female body, and a how it enables individual identities to flourish. This is shown through examples such as the red silk sari worn by Tamil-Swiss singer-songwriter Priya Ragu, a blockprint sari worn by self-proclaimed ‘Saree Man’ Himanshu Verma and the ‘Arch’ sari by Adavid, styled with a shirt by Bangladeshi architect, and advocate for body positivity, Sobia Ameen. There are also saris worn as a tool for protest, with examples of those worn by female demonstrators in rural India such as The Gulabi Gang and The Hargila Army.

Lastly, ‘New Materialities’ looks closely at the at the sari as a textile. It shows how the sari’s weave, texture, colour, and surface form a rich canvas for the incredible creativity of craftspeople. Further showing how makers and designers work symbiotically across a range of techniques, materials, and stimuli to transform ways of making in the 21st century. A highlight is a sari by Rimzim Dadu, which employs hair-thin stainless steel wires to create a gold sculpted wave.

This section further highlights India’s rich history of innovation, a history long overdue a wider audience. “For me and for so many others, the sari is of personal and cultural significance, but it is also a rich, dynamic canvas for innovation, encapsulating the vitality and eclecticism of Indian culture,” says Khanchandani. “Now that it has become the world’s most populated country, India’s significance within contemporary culture is vast, and the sari foregrounds the country’s undeniable imagination and verve, while asserting the relevance of Indian design on a global stage.”

Throughout its long history, all have used the sari in myriad ways, a truly democratic item of everyday clothing. That it remains so today is the real beauty of it. The Offbeat Sari, Design Museum, London, until September 17

Napa Valley proved the perfect setting to fall head over heels for the electrifying Rolls-Royce Spectre

WORDS: JOHN THATCHER

It is both a prophecy fulfilled and a promise kept. The global launch of Spectre onto the winding roads of California’s verdant wine country was proof that Charles Rolls, one half of Rolls-Royce, was somewhat of a mystic, stating his belief in an interview given way back in 1900 that a “perfectly noiseless” electric car would likely become the norm “when fixed charging stations can be arranged.”

While Rolls prophesied, Torsten Müller-Ötvös promised, the RollsRoyce Chief Executive adamant that Spectre would be a Rolls-Royce first and an electric car second. That it most certainly is.

Adding to the marque’s number of ghoulishly named cars, Spectre was always going to steal the spotlight. Not only is it the debut Rolls-Royce EV, the first of what will comprise the company’s entire fleet come 2030, but it’s also the first EV to be classed as ultra-luxury. In short, it needed to set new standards.

As such, Spectre’s testing was, to say the least, rigorous. It began in September 2021 and involved the car travelling across the globe to experience extremes of terrain and temperature (-40°C to +50°C), racking up more than 2.5 million kilometres, the equivalent of over 400 years of normal use.

Once at the wheel of Spectre, it takes slightly less time than that (minutes, in fact) to appreciate the car’s refined engineering. Without being aware of it, there is so much going on around you to ensure that the Rolls-Royce ride doesn’t alter in the absence of a V-12 engine that Spectre’s engineers, led by Syrian, Dr. Mihiar Ayoubi, describe it as a ‘RollsRoyce in ultra-high definition’, the most connected Rolls-Royce in history, with three times more sender-receiver signals than any previous model. In cornering alone, sensors respond to 20 different steering, braking, power delivery, and suspension parameters. Such attention to detail is characteristic of the whole car. Take, for example, the positioning of the 102kWh lithium-ion battery, placed not above or below the sills, as is the norm, but between them, adding acoustic insulation to imbue the sound of silence. Important in a Rolls-Royce. Spectre drives, as Charles Rolls predicted, perfectly noiselessly. Yes, most likely at the request of the majority of customers (Rolls-Royce always stresses the importance of canvassing their opinion), there is the option of pressing a button for a finely-tuned sound designed to mimic that of an engine-powered Rolls, but while certainly nice enough, it is, for me, needless. Silence is a luxury. And it’s a defining feature of every Rolls-Royce. A more intriguing noise can be heard by flicking the metal air vents. You read that right. Do so and the sound is something like a percussion instrument, the sonic treat mimicked by the ping of the indicator. You sense the design team had a lot of fun.

To mark this momentous occasion in the proud history of Rolls-Royce, the design team also came up with a number of firsts for Spectre. Among them, its Pantheon grille is the widest ever fitted to a RollsRoyce, beautiful when illuminated at night; it is also the first production RollsRoyce two-door coupé to be equipped with 23-inch wheels in almost 100 years; and the first to include Starlight Doors, which see them illuminated by 4,796 stars. This is optional and may sound like cosmic overkill coupled with the Starlight Headliner, but they do pair well. Then there’s Eleanor Thornton herself, better known as the Spirit of Ecstasy. To help establish Spectre’s striking aerodynamic silhouette, Eleanor has had a little makeover; her stance lower, smoother, and more in tune with the gorgeous, gentle curve of the long bonnet. This is probably what happens should you, like Eleanor, spend somewhere north of 800 hours being blasted in a windtunnel, though she can take enormous comfort from the fact that it was time well spent — contributing to a drag coefficient of 0.25Cd; a Rolls-Royce record.

Which brings us to range, the first question everyone has when it comes to EVs, but way down the list of importance when it comes to driving Spectre, particularly around a city. That drag coefficient figure adds a fair few kilometres for a confirmed range of 530km, but given that Rolls-Royce states that its customers drive an average of 5,100km per year in their current RollsRoyce model and have all expressed a desire for home-charging, there is little chance of Spectre triggering range rage.

What it does trigger while you’re at the wheel is a smile as wide as California’s roads. Powered by twin motors — the rearward develops 255bhp, and the front 480bhp — Rolls-Royce claims that, in performance terms, this equates to an internal combustion engine of 584bhp, and will willingly take you from 0-100km/h in 4.5 seconds.

Not that you’d want to get anywhere fast. The cabin is textbook Rolls-Royce in terms of comfort and beautiful materials, while providing a canvas for bespoke expression. Just slide in (avoid the temptation, if you can, to remove your shoes to sink your feet into the lambswool floormat) and press your foot on the brake pedal. In another feature unique to Spectre, this closes the driver’s door automatically.

It may point to the marque’s future, but Spectre is timeless Rolls-Royce.