Victoria Beckham Pre-Fall 2022 Collection

Balance is a big theme with Victoria Beckham. As a pop star who became a WAG who became a high-fashion designer, her life and work have always been a balancing act of contrasts: the popular and the exclusive, the sexy and the serious, the flamboyant and the sophisticated. It is, in essence, the secret to her success. Like many other brands at this logomanic moment in time, this season Beckham is launching her own monogram. It’s a graphic but clean infinity V.B., which the designer emblazoned across viscose twill dresses, blouses, and trousers in her pre-collection. She referred to it as “subtle, elegant, and chic,” a trinity key to Beckham, who has consistently kept her label away from flashiness, a territory often occupied by monogram. “Most of my starting points in designing are things that I don’t like. And I don’t like monograms,” she said on a video call from her London office. “I was never that person who wore big brands all over. Neither I nor David. But I can see that a lot of people do like that, so the challenge was: How do we do branding in an elegant and sophisticated and timeless way that we can carry on?” Last year, Beckham absorbed her diffusion line into her main line and reduced her price point significantly, opening the doors to her label to a fangirl segment that isn’t content paying £800 for a blouse but wants to buy into her celebrity name. Subtle or not, a monogram will be irresistible to that customer, while the more—shall we say—subdued V.B. client still has plenty of options too.

That balance defined this collection, which Beckham also used as an opportunity to make a declaration: “I want to bring sexy back but in my way. I don’t bury myself beneath clothes anymore. I want to celebrate being a woman. I want to accentuate my bum and my waist and feel sexy again. I want more structure, I want a leaner silhouette, and I want to make more of an event of dressing,” she said, with a diction that made you wish she’d run for prime minister someday. Beckham built that sexiness into her sleek, minimal, languid lines through seaming on dresses and trousers that shaped and elevated the derrière and through zips employed to structure dresses but that could be unzipped to show more skin.