Sometimes there is not much to say other than, “This person looks great.” And so: Victoria Beckham looks great. The designer was photographed yesterday afternoon in Paris—where she will be presenting her spring-summer 2025 collection later this week—wearing a distressed-knit pullover and a lace-trimmed tailored skirt from Balenciaga with a pair of Alaïa’s scarlet Decollete stilettos.
The elbows are hole-ridden, the cuffs frayed within an inch of their life: This is about as scruffy as the perma-blow-dried Beckham gets. It’s also the kind of thing that would cause a white-bread fashion fan to wrinkle their nose with disdain. “You paid how much [$1,050] for a raggedy old shirt?!” etc. Don’t worry: Beckham has never lost sleep over the opinions of sheep. “My attitude to fashion is pure Carrie Bradshaw,” the designer wrote in her 2007 style bible. “The way she put together her own outfits was totally original and fabulous. She knew that she looked great and she was having fun. Who cared that some of her boyfriends didn’t get it?” (Her ever-supportive husband, David, likes to wear pristine, shawl-collared cardigans, which he plans from an obsessively systemized wardrobe days in advance.)
The “scruff” stops with the crocodile Birkin, worn not as an influencer’s trophy item but, as Vogue’s Alice Newbold noted earlier this month, “over the arm of a businesswoman with four children and a schedule holding each minute to account.” And then there are the sunglasses: “If you’ve ever wondered why I’m always wearing them it’s very simple,” Victoria Beckham explained in her erstwhile fashion guide. “I often don’t get that much sleep, I don’t always have time to put on the Touche Éclat in the mornings, and who can be bothered putting on eyeshadow first thing in the day anyway? So, instead, I just throw on the sunglasses, which really do, as the magazines say, hide a multitude of sins.”
This article first appeared on British Vogue.
