While many of Europe’s luxury houses have been taking their resort shows to the United States this season, Victoria Beckham is about to cause her own splash there in a different way: She’s opening her first eponymous store outside the UK, in Miami. “I’m excited,” she exclaimed in a preview. “Our London store is doing so phenomenally well; it’s where you can see ready-to-wear, the accessories and the beauty all together. Where we see growth now is in global retail expansion.”
The location is a natural for Beckham, and the timing is part of a well-played piece of strategic planning. She knows the city well, since she and her husband David, who co-owns the Inter Miami CF football club (also doing phenomenally well) have had homes there since 2020. Coming right after last year’s release of her popular Netflix documentary, retail expansion is part of a steady burn for her brand in North America. “There’s a second store in New York, which will open in September.”
As a woman-designed adult-minded wardrobe poised between practicality and sexiness, this resort collection is characteristic of the highly relatable strengths Beckham has been building into her ready-to-wear for years. This season, part of the conversation in her studio revolved around her love of the 1930s. On the racks and in the lookbook, that shows up in variations on long, sinuous bias cut silk jersey evening dresses; slip-dressing elaborated with asymmetrically-bunched interior buttons here, veiled in slinky black tulle there, or grandly embellished with a bodice of plastic abstract floral embroidery as a red carpet show-stopper.
Doubtless plenty of these will be put to work by VB in her upcoming American publicity appearances this summer and into the fall, when the collection lands in her stores. The glam occasion-wear is balanced out by trouser suits—a tailoring source customers have come to rely on—and by her talent for assembling polished-looking daywear separates that show a clean-cut silhouette to the world. Among them are a khaki bomber jacket paired with a pencil skirt, an offering of blouses that can do day-to-night, and pristinely posh dippy-hemmed denim skirts.
Though there’s bound to be quite a bit of fanfare around the new store, this collection is built on the understanding that her biggest market is already in the States. That’s down to the booming Victoria Beckham beauty business, true, but also to the deep knowledge she applies to making clothes that are structured yet light enough to wear in climates like Florida’s, and her lived experience of clothes that work to function and flatter at the same time.
