Victoria Beckham to expand fashion line to Asia

NEW YORK - Agence France-Presse

A model presents a creation by designer Victoria Beckham during the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Fall 2015 in New York on February 15, 2015. AFP Photo

Cheered by her famous family, Victoria Beckham brought a sexy vision of fall/winter to an intimate New York runway show on Sunday and confided plans to open a second store in Asia.
      
The one-time pop star, mother of four and wife of retired English football superstar David Beckham, has won plaudits in the fashion industry for designing beautiful collections that flatter women's bodies.
      
David sat front row holding three-year-old daughter Harper on his lap and chatted with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour after arriving with sons Brooklyn, Romeo and Cruz all dressed in sharp black outfits.
      
Harper, dressed in a black frock with white cuffs and peter-pan collar, tried to capture the catwalk show with her own camera, perhaps inspired by the phalanx of photographers and delighting her doting father and Wintour.
     
Brooklyn, 15, chewing gum and dressed in black leather trousers looked effortlessly cool as he and his brother Romeo, who has modeled for Burberry, appeared to film the show discreetly from their cell phones.
      
Beckham summed up her collection backstage as sexy, liberating and full of bounce, after showcasing dresses with full skirts, textured knits with high necks and oversized coats with swinging bodies.
      
"It's very important that all of these clothes can be worn. They can go straight from the catwalk onto one of my ladies," she said.
      
"It feels sexy this season in those dresses with the plunging necklines that are fitted with the little drapes."       

She said that 2015 would see her spend a lot of time in Asia, where she plans to open a second store after the success of her Dover Street boutique in London.
                      
She told AFP bashfully that she "can't say" where the shop would be, but that she was flying to Hong Kong and Beijing in a few weeks.
      
"I'm really looking forward to it," she said. "I love the women there. They really understand fashion and style; they're beautiful. So why not Asia?"       

She said her choice of bouncy, lightweight wearable fabric was also influenced by varied climates and her increasingly global market.
      
"I'm selling my clothes, not just in New York and London, I'm selling clothes all around the world so I have to take into account the weight of fabric," she said.
      
A more intimate catwalk show than many at Fashion Week, Beckham treated guests to steaming glasses of Earl Grey tea, handed as they came in from 16-degree Fahrenheit (minus nine Celsius) temperatures outside.
      
Held in the imposing surrounds of Cipriani on Broadway, the 65-foot (20-meter) high ceilings of the 1921 building, soaring marble columns, inlaid floors and murals handed a neo-Renaissance elegance to the proceedings.
      
Beckham, who was praised backstage by fashion journalists for a flattering and beautiful collection, said she was delighted with the growing success of her eponymous label.
      
"I'm really enjoying building the business, I'm really enjoying having the shop. It's great. I'm very happy. I feel very lucky to do something I love," she said, chatty and charming backstage.
     
"I love having them here. They're so supportive of what I do. We all support each other," she gushed of the family.
      
Here are the other highlights of New York Fashion Week, day four:               

50 SHADES OF BROWN       

Brown dominated at Derek Lam's collection that paid homage to the timeless elegance and individuality of actresses Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow and Katharine Hepburn.
      
Lam summed up his look as "luxurious but a bit more warm and cozy" and said he loved the "cut-to-the-chase kind of sensibility" of his muses.
      
"Like New York City, it's complicated, it's messy but these women have been able to create an identity in this kind of chaos and do it kind of with warmth and courage," he said.         The sharpness of his tailoring and the texture of the clothes accentuated the tiny frame of the waif-thin catwalk models.
      
"Yes, the runway is one thing, but the way the pants are tailored, the jackets are tailored you can have that kind of idealized silhouette," he said.
              
SEXY       

Diane von Furstenberg transported the catwalk into a sensuous boudoir bathed in black and red for the "double agent" -- the woman who commands her world by day and inspires fantasy at night.