Victoria Beckham’s introduction to collecting art is, as one might expect, celebrity gold. “I remember being at Elton John’s house in the south of France. Elton obviously has a very impressive art collection, and we happened to be having breakfast looking up at an enormous [Julian] Schnabel,” she says, as we walk through her clothing label’s flagship store in London’s Mayfair. It was, she recalls, “my first experience with art and really seeing it up close”.
We are speaking as Beckham’s store doubles up as an art gallery for the next few days. She opened the store on Dover Street in 2014, partly she says because it has the look and feel of an art gallery — and there are certainly many around in Mayfair. Not everyone was convinced she would make it in the fashion world, but Beckham has converted the sceptics with her contemporary command of expensive but quiet luxury.
Alongside her latest collection, Beckham has chosen some big-hitting names of the 20th and 21st century, so shoppers will catch sight of a wide-eyed, cartoonish girl, painted by the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, staring down at the boutique’s first-floor rails. Near the Nara is a densely coloured abstract pastel by the American artist Joan Mitchell, while works elsewhere include a red-backed, jazzy assemblage of an anonymous Black figure by celebrity favourite Jean-Michel Basquiat and a painting of a tormented artist and his relatively tranquil muse by the cubism-inspired George Condo.
These pieces don’t belong to Beckham (although she confesses to being particularly partial to the Nara). Rather, the display has been organised in partnership with Sotheby’s auction house, where they come for sale in the next few months.
Dressed in a simple black jumper and trousers, Beckham enthuses about the personal connections she finds in art. Of the Nara in her boutique, she says: “I love the characters that he creates. I find the colour palette so sophisticated but I also love the childlike elements, that sense of fun. And that is something that I always like to incorporate in my fashion collections. I want things to be elegant, really considered and not overcomplicated . . . but I like to have that little sense of personality.” Plus, she laughs, the moody works “remind me a little bit of my children”.
Beckham’s collaboration with Sotheby’s comes at a time when art and fashion are increasingly bedfellows. Louis Vuitton boasted long queues for its instantly recognisable, polka-dotted designs by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, while the Louvre Museum in Paris is currently hosting its first ever fashion exhibition, Louvre Couture, comprising pieces from 45 designers and fashion houses (until July 21).
“Cross-pollinating” with a new clientele has been part of the pleasure, Beckham says. This is not the first art project in her store — she partnered with Sotheby’s in 2018 to show Old Masters works, and followed that up by a showing of female Old Masters painters. Other projects have included hosting a 2021 takeover of ultra-bright neon installations by Chila Burman, who had similarly transformed the façade of Tate Britain the previous year.
It all seems more opportune now that both art and fashion are grappling with a difficult macroeconomic environment and a consumer base hungry for experiences beyond buying a painting or a dress. Beckham might not be an expert in art, but she is astute about the potential power of its message within her offering.
“Looking at clothes in a luxurious environment and being treated well and every single element of a person discovering and experiencing the brand, as I like it, is important to me and my team.” Art, she says, plays an essential role. “If you can come into the store, and shop whilst looking at George Condo, I mean it absolutely doesn’t get any better than that,” she declares.
Federica Carlotto of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and author of Luxury Brand and Art Collaborations: Postmodern Consumer Culture, highlights the commercial advantages too. “Luxury brands use a strategy of exclusivity and scarcity — though with the ultimate aim to sell as much as they can — and art fits in because it somehow elevates it with the romantic ideal of one person making a unique object,” she says. The effect works both ways: “Connecting art with fashion, which is by definition current and sexy, gives it a way to communicate, to be resonant — and therefore economically relevant,” Carlotto says.
Beckham resists discussing the commercial realities of both art and fashion. She says her mantra since her store opened in 2014 has been: “I want people to really feel welcome, even if they’re coming in not to buy anything” — although her brand finally turned a profit in 2022. Of the art she and her husband David buy, she says, “it’s something we want to hang on to and enjoy, as opposed to just buying for investment”.
Their taste is for the contemporary, with a preference for gently rebellious, well-known names who serve up immediate impact. These include the Young British Artists, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst — David bought Emin’s pink neon “I promise to love you” for Victoria, while they were living in Los Angeles (between 2007 and 2013), she recalls. Among the artists that the Beckhams’ collection shares with the Sotheby’s showing are Basquiat, Nara and the New York-based Richard Prince — “one of our preferred artists”.
Victoria is herself the subject of one of the works in their collection, by Prince, based on his New Portraits, which controversially appropriate screenshots, often from Instagram. For the Beckhams, the artist took a screengrab of Victoria from the Spice Girls’ 1996 video for “Say You’ll Be There”. As legend has it, it was while watching this before they met — with Victoria alluringly clad in a black, latex catsuit — that David declared to his fellow footballer and friend Gary Neville “I’m going to marry her”.
Victoria says that she and David have similar taste and enjoy discussing art. “There’s nothing better than to go out on date night and not necessarily talk about fashion, football, beauty or business, but to just talk about something that we’re really enjoying learning about together,” she says.
Art, then, is “an enjoyable hobby”, one with an especially welcome impact on her children (she and David have four). Her youngest, 13-year-old Harper, “loves art” and has just been given a school project on the hypnotic light and space artist James Turrell. “It’s amazing. We’ve been at a friend’s house, who happens to have a James Turrell, and we’ve seen a few of his shows in Los Angeles, and I just thought it is so wonderful to be so young and to have experienced pieces like that.”
She is, she says, happy to use her Mayfair boutique as “a wonderful place to celebrate other people’s work” but she does harbour an arty ambition of her own. “It would be my dream to collaborate with an artist, to actually work with them on, for example, a print. That’s on my wish list,” she says.
Victoria Beckham x Sotheby’s runs at 36 Dover Street from February 5-10
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