Known for her signature minimalism, Beckham has discovered a new way to do minimalism that looks maximal, and the results are fantastic.
For Fall/Winter 2016, Victoria Beckham circled back to the silhouette that legitimized her career as a fashion designer – the corset – but when you go back to see where she started, it’s clear that she’s come a long way. Not only is this fact serviced by her A+ collection for the forthcoming fall season, but also in how she has steadily evolved her aesthetic into one that is polished, relaxed, and supremely desirable.
Known for her signature minimalism, Beckham has discovered a new way to do minimalism that looks maximal, and the results are fantastic. She achieved this with the interplay of prints, patterns, and colors that made her surfaces pop with vivid, graphic geometry. Even her revamped corset shows her growth as a designer, with its side cut-outs and shrunken bra cups that are a far cry from her original corset silhouette.
As Beckham begins to embrace an unfussier, less complicated aesthetic, her ability to transform the female form with the use of vivid prints marks her transformation as a designer.
Additionally, the inclusion of skin-baring corset tops and slinky slip dresses in a Fall/Winter 2016 collection underscore her progress. Where once we might penalize a designer for showing too much skin in a winter collection (since the aesthetic hardly makes sense given the season), Beckham wisely chose this transeasonal item as the collection’s core to prove her knowledge of her own markets and customers. As she prepares to open a flagship store in Hong Kong, where it’s steadily 20 degrees in the winter as opposed to New York’s below-freezing temperatures, she acknowledges that her customer base wants different things according to their geographic environment by including both covered-up and exposed looks.
First, the covered-up looks feature a variety of preppy ribbed knits with contrast trim, baggy trousers, and chic longline jackets, most of which display harlequin patterns and Prince of Wales plaid. Emphasized along clean lines, the muted colors of her patterns still read optimistic as they happily criss-cross each other on beautifully tailored garments. Slip dresses and bandaged corset tops follow the same patterns, but are cut generously at the hips and sport fitted bodices. As Beckham begins to embrace an unfussier, less complicated aesthetic, her ability to transform the female form with the use of vivid prints marks her transformation as a designer, making us more eager than ever to see what she has in store next.
