Two years ago, Netflix’s David Beckham docuseries aired to rave reviews and great streaming numbers. I loved the series – it was well-done and interesting. There was a lot I didn’t know about David’s career, and I liked how David and Victoria addressed the most difficult moments of their marriage, including David’s affair with Rebecca Loos. Well, the series was so successful, Victoria now has her own stand-alone Netflix docuseries. Last night was the big premiere event in London, and three out of four of David and Victoria’s children came out for it. It looks like Brooklyn and Nicola Peltz Beckham really have gone no-contact with David and Victoria. Harper, Cruz and Romeo showed up for their mom though. Harper even wore one of her mom’s designs to the premiere!
In the series, Victoria apparently talks about everything, even her years-long struggles in the fashion business. Her fashion line has only recently started making a profit, and that’s mostly because of the beauty line attached to it. Victoria also addressed her years-long struggle with an eating disorder:
Victoria Beckham is opening up about her eating disorder, detailing how it affected her life behind the scenes. In the Netflix docuseries titled Victoria Beckham, the former pop-star-turned-fashion-designer, 51, breaks her silence on her experience with the condition.
Beckham said: “I was weighed on national television when Brooklyn was six months old – ‘Get on those scales, have you lost the weight?’ We joke about it and we laugh about it on TV, but I was really, really young and that hurts. I really started to doubt myself and not like myself, because I let it affect me.”
She added: “I didn’t know what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Was I fat? Was I thin? You lose all sense of reality. I’ve been everything from ‘Porky Posh’ to ‘Skinny Posh’. It’s been a lot, and that’s hard. I had no control over what was being written about me, pictures that were being taken, and I wanted to control that. I could control it with clothing, I could control my weight, and I was controlling it in an incredibly unhealthy way.”
“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 being told constantly that you’re not good enough, and I suppose that’s been with me my whole life.”
In a separate confessional, her husband, David Beckham, looks back at the microscope on women in the early 2000s. “People felt it was okay to criticize a woman for her weight, for what she’s doing for what she’s wearing. There were a lot of things happening in TV then that wouldn’t happen now, that can’t happen now. My Victoria that I knew, sits at home in track suit, smiling laughing, having a glass of wine. That started to go purely because of the criticism that she was getting,” the former athlete remembers.
[From People & The Telegraph]
Some of the British media’s headlines are in the vein of “Victoria Beckham admits to lying!” Like… that’s the thing about being in the throes of an eating disorder, especially for a woman in the spotlight, dealing with a national/international media mocking your weight constantly. Of course she lied, of course she struggled with that sh-t for years, of course it probably still affects her to this day. I also think having a daughter changed Victoria and made her “unlearn” some of her own unhealthy behaviors and attitudes. I do not get the impression that Victoria is putting those pressures on Harper at all.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
