The Biggest Takeaways from Victoria Beckham’s Netflix Docuseries

After stealing the show in her husband’s Netflix docuseries, Victoria Beckham is taking center stage with her own project. Victoria Beckham, a three-part limited series streaming now, traces the trajectory of its titular subject over decades, from her rise as a Spice Girl to the launch of her eponymous fashion line. As Beckham previously told ELLE in our October 2025 cover story, she wasn’t into the idea of being a documentary subject, but her husband, David, eventually talked her into it.

“I genuinely couldn’t understand why anybody was that interested. I love what I do, but I was a bit shocked,” she told ELLE. “But throughout the process, I’ve really enjoyed it. I love the fact that I have an opportunity to shine a light on our industry—how serious an industry it is.”

A bulk of the series covers Beckham’s endeavors as a fashion designer, but it also dives into her family life and how she privately handles media scrutiny. Here are some of the biggest takeaways.

Even if you remember regularly seeing Beckham in the news and tabloids during her Spice Girls or WAG eras, looking back at the coverage all at once now is quite jarring. The series shows clips in succession of male commentators insulting Beckham, calling her “just a common little bitch” and saying she had “kind of a used look.” One said she’d feel at home in Los Angeles, the “land of size-zero beach bodies and botox.” Another went as far as saying he hoped she “eventually starves to death.” It’s brutal.

Beckham’s mother, Jackie Adams, says in the doc that she would save all mentions of her daughter in the paper, even the ones that were difficult to read. “It was very hard, reading bits in the paper about you, because some of them were vicious, weren’t they?” Adams tells Beckham in one scene. “A lot of the stuff was really, really bad.” Beckham replies that having her family’s support helped keep her strong. “I think it’s having such a strong family unit that always used to help me get through those things,” she says.

While looking back at her childhood, Beckham reveals she used to have body image issues, which were exacerbated by how she was treated in theater school. She was often put in the back of formations for dance performances because she was heavier than other girls at the time.

That kind of scrutiny returned when she was in the spotlight as a pop star and new mom. Beckham remembers being “weighed on national television” when her eldest son, Brooklyn, was six-months-old. Though she laughed along with the skit at the time, she acknowledges now, “I was really, really young. And that hurts.”

She understood that she couldn’t control what the media said about her, but she could control her appearance, which led her down a dangerous path. “I could control my weight, and I could control it in an incredibly unhealthy way,” she explains in the doc. “When you have an eating disorder, you become very good at lying. And I was never honest about it with my parents. I never talked about it publicly. It really affects you when you’re told constantly, ‘You’re not good enough. And I suppose that’s been with me my whole life.’”

Beckham struggled to be taken seriously as a designer at first, but when she finally found her footing and earned acclaim across the industry, the business struggled to stay afloat. The company was “millions of pounds in the red” and there was “so much waste,” she says in the series. And while her husband was financially supporting the business, she felt bad repeatedly coming back to him for help. David ultimately expressed that they reached a point where he couldn’t back the business himself; they needed an outside investor.

That’s when Beckham sought the help of David Belhassen, founder of NEO Investment Partners, which has amplified brands like Valextra, an accessories company based in Milan, and Vuarnet, a French sunglasses label. While going through the books, Belhassen found “losses, losses, losses, losses. Never made a profit,” he says in the series. “Frankly, I had never seen something as hard as that to fix.”

He almost declined to work with Beckham until he realized his wife was a fan of the brand, inspiring him to move forward. Still, he had his work cut out for him. He found a pattern of excessive spending, including £70,000 ($92,990) on office plants and £15,000 ($19,900) to water them. (That’s almost $113,00 total just on plants!) “And that was just the beginning,” Belhassen says. He helped restructure the business by cutting unnecessary spending while sticking to Beckham’s vision, and she was receptive. “I took it on the chin,” she says.

Looking back, she says part of the problem was the “power of celebrity” and “people being afraid to tell her no”; but she also wants to “hold my hands up and be accountable for things that I have done and I should have done differently.”