For the June 2016 issue – a 460-page salute to the magazine’s 100th anniversary – everyone from Joan Collins to Cheryl Cole recounted their memories of being immortalised in Vogue’s pages. There, between Penelope Tree’s recollection of her first shoot with David Bailey (“I felt like a frog being dissected under a microscopeâ€) and Jane Birkin’s account of “keeping an eye pencil under my pillow so that, even in the middle of the night, I could quickly paint on daisy eyesâ€, are Juergen Teller shots of a newly engaged, heavily pregnant Victoria Adams and David Beckham from the March 1999 issue, accompanied by VB’s reminiscences.
“I was so excited when the request for this Vogue story came in,†the designer and mother of four admitted in 2016. “David and I had never done something like this together. I knew who Juergen was, but I didn’t really know who Juergen was. I mean, now, would I do a shoot with my tummy showing? No, I absolutely wouldn’t. But at the time I wasn’t nervous, we were in love, we looked great, we didn’t care. I was wearing my own stretchy high-street top and Maharishi trousers (why did I?), but I was happy-go-lucky then. Juergen is not intrusive when he takes his pictures – he just whips out his little camera – so it just felt like David and I were spending the day together and there happened to be a photographer there.â€
A print from said shoot would end up “on the wall of our Manchester apartmentâ€, she added – taking its place there around the same time that Brooklyn Beckham took up residence in his nursery. “David and I were so young then: I was 24, he was 23. I was pregnant and we were planning our wedding. We had to spend quite a lot of time apart because I was still in the Spice Girls, although it was coming to an end, and David was playing for Manchester United. And yet everywhere we went together, people said they could just feel this electricity between us. I think this picture really shows that; it also shows David as I really know him.â€
As Victoria turns 50 today, revisit the shoot – and excerpts from Christa D’Souza’s accompanying interview – below.
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“We’ve always been more like friendsâ€
“One thing is certain: they are completely, utterly, unconditionally mad for each other. A goofy smile of compliance spreads across David’s picture-perfect features whenever his fiancée asks him one of her rhetorical questions. Victoria, meanwhile, a little wan without her face on and clearly impatient to give birth (‘I just want to see what it looks like’), perpetually strokes and pats David with her babyish stick-on French manicured fingers as though she’d really rather be sitting in his lap… or have him sit in hers. I assume she’s being serious when she says she almost had the builders put side-by-side lavatories in the master suite’s bathroom. ‘I’ve weed in front of David right from the beginning,’ she shrugs, ‘but then we’ve always been more like friends. Well, looks aren’t going to last forever, are they?’
“Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how David would have survived without her support after that red card incident at last year’s World Cup. The lambasting he got in the press was bad enough, but what most incensed Posh – still incenses Posh – was the effigy in a sarong with a number seven on its back that was hung from a rope in some pub owner’s back garden. Beckham admits to weeping only twice over the furore – when he saw his parents straight afterwards and when he met Victoria in New York… ‘A lot of people would have topped themselves over that,’ Victoria says thoughtfully, and then leans over her bump to give David yet another hug. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll look after you.’â€
“I always tell him he looks lovely, but he’s not comfortable at allâ€
“[It’s touching to imagine] this sublimely handsome young lad, sitting in his dressing room at home (they each have their own), head bowed and hands woven despairingly into blond highlights, wondering which of the hundreds of brand-new outfits staring at him from the rails he should put on in the morning. According to his fiancée, he’s totally paranoid about his appearance. ‘I always tell him he looks lovely,’ explains Victoria, who later reveals she is keen for them both to be photographed in a campaign for The Gap, ‘but he’s not comfortable at all about what he looks like, are you?’
“Let’s not forget, though, that the pair of them haven’t lived this curious fishbowl existence for very long. Victoria certainly hasn’t forgotten, recalling in detail the time last summer when she and David were staying with Elton John in the south of France and got a call to go to supper with ex-Ginger Spice, Geri Halliwell, who was staying just down the road with George Michael. ‘David and I just kept pinching ourselves,’ remembers Victoria. ‘I mean, we’ve both been fans of George Michael for ages.’ Then there was the time Victoria introduced Madonna to David after a show the Spice Girls did in Madison Square Garden. ‘She went to him, “You must be the famous footballer.†As soon as she walked out of the room, he rang his mate Gary and shouted down the phone, “Guess what? Madonna knew who I was!â€â€™
“I have heard there are some babies who never sleep… aren’t there?â€
“Who knows what their baby – who is to be delivered in February at The Portland Hospital in central London – will be like? In any event, he or she will have an utterly devoted Mummy and Daddy – particularly Daddy, who admits that he’d like to have six children and drive all of them around in his Bentley Arnage – and will want for nothing. Except perhaps a nanny, since Victoria and David, amazingly, have decided they are going to do all the child rearing on their own, just like normal people, with help when they need it from Victoria’s mum, Jacqui. ‘But then I have the kind of job where I can do that,’ says Victoria. ‘I’ll just take it into the studio with me in a backpack.’ And nights? ‘Oh, straight in a cot, because you have to draw the line somewhere,’ she says briskly, adding with an uncharacteristic question mark in her voice, ‘although I have heard there are some babies who never sleep… aren’t there?’
“They have no idea what sex the baby will be, but one gets the distinct impression Victoria would like to follow in her younger sister Louise’s footsteps and have a girl. And I can see her point as I watch her shepherding David, one of the surest people in the world on his feet, out of the restaurant, down the stairs and into their custom-designed £70,000 Range Rover. She’s right. Two boys to look after would be more than enough to handle.â€
