If we didn’t know it was the late 1990s, the sheer number of butterfly clips in Victoria Beckham’s hair would give it away. Presenter Chris Evans sits opposite her on the chaotic set of TFI Friday. The show aired post-work on a Friday evening, when TV was still a mainstream concern; Evans was its “cheeky chappy” host, pushing the limits of pre-watershed content.
“Now a lot of girls want to know – because you look fantastic again,” Evans begins, gesturing to his own weedy midsection, “how did you get back your shape after your birth?”
“I’m really lazy – I don’t go down the gym or anything,” Victoria drawls, rolling out the standard interview response of the 90s ladette.
“You’re one of those sickening women who didn’t have to do anything,” Evans interrupts, bored. “Is your weight back to normal?”
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“Yeah. It is.”
“Can I check?”
Evans produces an old-fashioned set of bathroom scales from under the desk. Beckham hides real distress under comic outrage: “Oh, but you did this to Geri [Halliwell], didn’t you? But Geri was, like, really small ...”
“Oh come on ...” says Evans in the “be a good sport” rallying cry of bullies everywhere, as he plonks the scales at Beckham’s feet. She stands to weigh her post-partum body on live television, pausing briefly to point towards her peep-toe heels. I recognise the pause – it’s one I do myself when asked to weigh in at the doctor’s. Do I take my shoes off and show I care, or leave them on and pretend I don’t? Beckham, I think, is doing the shoe dance. The heels stay on.
“Eight stone! It’s not bad at all, is it?” Evans shouts to the studio audience. They cheer. She looks relieved.
It’s been more than 25 years since Victoria Beckham was weighed on live television. In her new Netflix documentary, she speaks openly for the first time about suffering from an eating disorder. The problems began, she says, when she trained as a dancer and was scrutinised for her body, and were worsened by the media obsession that followed the Spice Girls and her marriage to David Beckham.
Anybody who remembers Beckham’s emaciated figure in the 2000s won’t be shocked by the revelation. Posh Spice was a slim but healthy teenager when Wannabe became a global sensation. By 2000, when Beckham walked in London Fashion Week, she personified the extremes of the size-zero era.
A circulating TikTok shows the late fashion journalist Hilary Alexander OBE trying to hide a smile as she details Beckham’s appearance: “She didn’t look skinny at all, and her thighs were nicely rounded.” If Alexander had been speaking about me getting dressed in the morning this would be fairly accurate. As a description for a 26-year-old Victoria Beckham, it’s a devastating piece of antiphrasis. Beckham’s illness was so undeniable that it’s less a personal affliction than a societal one.
A couple of years ago, David Beckham revealed his wife’s intensely controlled eating habits. On the River Café podcast he said, “unfortunately I’m married to someone that has eaten the same thing for the last 25 years. Since I met her she only eats grilled fish and steamed vegetables.” Food, as the documentary suggests, became one of the few things Beckham could control when her body, image and story were outside her jurisdiction.
Watching the archive footage, what’s striking isn’t just the misogyny and fat-phobia of the “girl power” era, but the vitriol directed at Beckham herself. She was criticised for being too big, too small, for losing baby weight too quickly or not quickly enough, for looking glum in photographs, and for appearing in them at all. The art critic Brian Sewell once called her a “common little b****” on national television, accusing her of stealing the spotlight from her husband.
Beckham says in the documentary, “if you have an eating disorder you get very good at lying.” But perhaps it wasn’t lying so much as losing sight of her reality altogether. “I didn’t know what I saw when I looked in the mirror,” she says. “Was I fat? Was I thin? I don’t know ... I was just very critical of myself. I didn’t like what I saw. I had no control over what was being written about me or the pictures being taken, and I suppose I wanted to control that.”
It’s an admission that feels strangely modern. Beckham has always been photographed, but today’s young women might understand that confusion more than ever in the age of constant self-documentation on social media. If you are endlessly looked at, how can you ever know what you really look like?
The Beckham documentary exposes the darker side of “girl power”: a culture that expected women to be impossibly thin without appearing to try. But have things changed that much? Now, women are still expected to be slim, but also “relatable.”
In a 2024 Grazia interview marking her 50th birthday, Beckham acknowledged her strict habits: “I’m very disciplined with the way I eat, the way I work out and the way I work. That’s just who I am.” Then, almost as if to offset it, she added: “Life’s too short not to have a drink. I’m not going to be one of those ‘there are too many calories in a glass of wine’ types. Whatever. Life’s too short. Let’s have a nice time.”
We’re a long way past the ladettes who drank pints and didn’t go to the gym, but the bind remains. Women are still expected to care about their bodies while pretending not to. Extreme thinness is back in fashion; only now the question isn’t about how fast you “snap back” after childbirth, but whether you’re on Ozempic.
And while Beckham’s discipline isn’t relatable, her need to be relatable is. And perhaps that’s the point: she’s still being weighed – we all are – just by different measures.
