Has Victoria Beckham quietly become a caped crusader for what smart, busy, chic women want to wear?
Her collection at New York Fashion Week this morning was a Sunday place to rest your eyes, after a chaotic week. Good thing, too, because you’ll need her sophisticated, luxe and easy-to-wear pieces to get you through your next crazy week – and you won’t look like you went to any trouble at all. Oh this fabulous thing? Vic just whipped it up for me.
This is a woman who clearly understands what modern, multi-tasking women want (and need) to wear. We are busy; we manage families, friendships, Fortune 500s, and still find time to fluff the pillows on the living room sofa. We love fashion, but the cost-per-wear ratio on our recent purchases is as sky-high as some of our stilts. Fur boxing gloves are cute, but may not help us to win any battles, fashion or otherwise. We need options.
Actually, we have too many fashion options, but what we need is really simple. We want clothes that feel good, make us feel good and make it easy for us to look really, really good. Not everyone speaks fashion fluently, after all. What our friend Vic does is she edits our closets from within her studio. She gives us clothes that we can wear to work, that we can slip on, to meet our favourite girlfriend for Early Spring Darjeeling at the Shangri-La, to spend our booked-solid days in. As an aside, she did have hunky male servers, passing around tea before her show, but the choices were English Breakfast or Japanese Popcorn, according to Twitter.
For Fall/Winter 2013, she has expanded her silhouette – quite literally – with voluminous jackets and curved shoulders. What Mrs. Beckham has done is marry her signature look with her penchant for Japanese shapes (she does wear lots of Junya and CDG, after all). The Japanese inspiration is evident, but not copied. It is very much her own. I can now recognize a Victoria Beckham garment, and that is saying something in this day and age when the work of multiple designers starts to blur together. Wait a minute, were those tea options all part of her 360-degree branding strategy? This marketing girl loves that level of strategic detail.
I appreciate a brand and a fashion line that evolves over time. So many designers try to re-invent themselves each and every season, veering far away from what they’ve done just a few months before. We are missing the art of story-telling within so many collections – not all of them take the time to punctuate, to highlight, and to pause. I don’t necessarily want a new book each season. Sometimes I want to know how the story you started to tell me last time, turns out. What Victoria Beckham has done is to build her collections, referencing her last one but giving us a new plot twist, having the patience and discipline to deliver her vision, one season at a time.
That discipline, that patience, that gradual evolution in her collections has also given us the evolution of Victoria Beckham, the professional.
She is now a fashion designer, first – one who happened to have been in a pop group years ago.
Like the collections she designs, she has grown, evolved, moved forward – and in that way, she is also very much like one of us.
Photos: top two images from The New York Times; remaining photos via Vogue.com.
