<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Over shoes, Victoria Beckham deliberates like Goldilocks, but in reverse. Instead of finding something comfy\u2014comfy being a word entirely absent from her lexicon\u2014she appears to search for the pair that could land her in traction. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want anything middle-of-the-road,&amp;quot; she says, scanning the selection before seizing a Nina Ricci bootie with a platform toe and completely heelless back. It creates a not-quite-human silhouette, as if the wearer were standing en pointe\u2014or were equipped with an elegant set of hooves. Middle-of-the-road? In these shoes, most women couldn&amp;#039;t get off the curb. Beckham\u2014now six inches taller than her usual 5&amp;#039;6&amp;quot;\u2014trots across the floor. &amp;quot;What d&amp;#039;you think, Romeo?&amp;quot; she asks, ruffling her seven-year-old son&amp;#039;s hair. &amp;quot;Mummy, those shoes are crazy,&amp;quot; he says, impressed.  Such are the Alexis Carrington\u2013meets\u2013Donna Reed moments in the life of Victoria Beckham. As her friend Eva Longoria says: &amp;quot;Victoria is a mom and a wife first, but I always say she must be the sexiest, most stylish mother in the world.&amp;quot; The day before this shoe-stravaganza, Beckham arrived for an interview at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where tennis whites and pearl chokers are still de rigueur, in spiky black Louboutin booties, a slinky, black, long-sleeved Thomas Wylde shirt open down to there, and about three miles of glossy, supertan leg. Allegedly, there were shorts, but the effect was of utter pantslessness. Romeo, wearing snappy black overalls and a mini dog-tag necklace, was dragging a teddy bear named Kobe Bryant facedown through the lobby on a leash. Ten-year-old Brooklyn and four-year-old Cruz were at home &amp;quot;creating chaos in the pool,&amp;quot; but Romeo, the family&amp;#039;s budding fashionisto, wanted to see mummy&amp;#039;s magazine moment. &amp;quot;His outfit was a gift from John Galliano,&amp;quot; Beckham says. &amp;quot;When he got it, he was so excited he wouldn&amp;#039;t take it off for three days.&amp;quot; Two years after Britain&amp;#039;s most famous family transitioned to Tinseltown (see Victoria Beckham: Coming to America), the woman formerly known as Posh has been reborn. &amp;quot;You know, I love America. It&amp;#039;s such a positive country,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;When people say to me, `How long did it take for you to adjust? Poor you, it must&amp;#039;ve been really difficult&amp;#039;\u2014poor me? I&amp;#039;m living in Beverly Hills. I&amp;#039;m very, very lucky. I wake up every morning and I recognize that I&amp;#039;m blessed.&amp;quot; She has settled into her own slightly surreal version of reality: dropping the kids off at school every morning, hitting the gym (a new development for a woman who has long declared she never exercises); working on her fashion line, DVB by Victoria Beckham, by day; hanging out with Tony and Eva and Tom and Katie by night. The previous evening, she says, she and husband David joined buddies Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony for a late-night, jeans-and-sweatshirts show of The Hangover. And did the foursome hunker down in a private screening room? &amp;quot;We go to a normal theater!&amp;quot; Beckham insists. One with underground parking.  The Beckhams have new his-and-hers tattoos to celebrate both their tenth anniversary and the end of one of the toughest spots in their marriage. While David was on loan to a soccer team in Milan for six and a half months, Victoria was at loose ends. &amp;quot;I felt like someone had chopped my arm off, to be completely honest,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Everything we do, we do together. I very rarely go out on my own, unless it&amp;#039;s a work commitment.&amp;quot; Holed up at home, the self-described &amp;quot;squarest woman in Beverly Hills&amp;quot; would tuck in the kids and console herself with TV box sets.   &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve done Nip/Tuck, Brothers &amp;amp;amp; Sisters, Grey&amp;#039;s Anatomy, Private Practice,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Then I got into Gossip Girl. I&amp;#039;m beyond obsessed with that show.&amp;quot; So obsessed that she phoned the costume designer; expect to see Blair Waldorf modeling a Victoria Beckham original this fall.  Beckham says this development is more exciting than years at the top of the pops. Despite rumors of acting ambitions\u2014&amp;quot;rubbish,&amp;quot; she says\u2014the 35-year-old has proclaimed her days as a performer over. Not that she&amp;#039;s ruling out guest spots, such as stepping in as a guest judge on next season&amp;#039;s American Idol, but &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m very realistic,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I know my boundaries\u2014I know what I&amp;#039;m good at and what I&amp;#039;m not good at.&amp;quot; Her calling, she says, is fashion, an ambition that has been &amp;quot;a lifetime in the making.&amp;quot; Beckham is on a mission to be taken seriously as a designer. To the surprise of some, her line, now in its third season, is elegant, restrained, almost maniacally well- constructed\u2014clothing built to last, as she hopes the line itself will. Rather than staging runway shows, she presents each collection in intimate, hotel-suite appointments at which she talks her audience of fashion industry insiders through every stitch. &amp;quot;People must think, Shut up! I&amp;#039;m sure I drive them mad,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I want to make sure everybody saw that seaming detail\u2014that took a long time, and I&amp;#039;m proud of it.&amp;quot; Clearly she&amp;#039;s doing something right: Her debut collection sold out in three minutes on Net-a-porter.com. And the gray wool number she&amp;#039;s modeling in these pages may be long gone; when her fall &amp;#039;09 collection was previewed on Net-a-porter in late July, her pieces were snapped up in seven minutes flat. Suffice to say that L.A. hasn&amp;#039;t really influenced her aesthetic. &amp;quot;I find it odd that people will go to a nice restaurant or to the theater in jeans and T-shirts,&amp;quot; she says, before catching herself\u2014after more than a decade of media scrutiny, Beckham won&amp;#039;t risk a negative comment. Ever. &amp;quot;You know, it&amp;#039;s great, David loves it. But it&amp;#039;s very different to my personal style.&amp;quot; Has she swapped her London Louboutins for 90210 Uggs? &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t changed the way that I dress at all,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;which is probably why people stare a lot.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She has the persona of a star, and she turns it on when she needs to,&amp;quot; says London-based designer Antonio Berardi, a pal since the Spice Girls days (he designed the Beckhams&amp;#039; infamous purple post-wedding outfits). &amp;quot;When you&amp;#039;re with her, she&amp;#039;s the nicest, kindest, most down-to-earth person that you could ever meet. At the end of the day, she&amp;#039;s humble. Human.&amp;quot; Jennifer Lopez adds: &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s wickedly funny. I told her, `If I ever do a show with comedy sketches, I want you on it! People need to know this side of you.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;   On the shoot, when photographer Tom Munro mentioned that he&amp;#039;d hurt his back wrestling with a lawn mower, Beckham replied drolly: &amp;quot;Say you were having sex, hanging from the ceiling! You were out drunk! Leave the grass-cutting between us.&amp;quot; The question is, Why craft a persona that is so clearly different from, and frankly not nearly as likable as, one&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; self? Pouty Posh seems worlds apart from the flesh-and-blood woman, but whether Beckham minds being mislabeled is unclear; it&amp;#039;s she who cultivated that image in the first place. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not one of these people that needs to feel loved. I don&amp;#039;t need to see my picture everywhere,&amp;quot; she says. Though the Beckhams are certainly used to that by now. On a recent romantic reunion post\u2013David&amp;#039;s Italian job, the couple was photographed unawares on a remote beach in the Seychelles\u2014resulting in an impromptu fashion moment: &amp;quot;I can never get my head round what to wear on holiday, so I bought one of the staff uniforms at the hotel,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;They were pushing quite a cool look.&amp;quot; There she was, in a long cotton sarong, a towel on her head, when &amp;quot;some bloody paparazzi&amp;quot; appeared. &amp;quot;I looked like I should be mopping down the boat! A cross between a cleaning lady and Joan Collins!&amp;quot; she crows. (Becks, incidentally, wore a sliver of white Lycra with ITALIA emblazoned across the seat.) She knows that &amp;quot;people think I&amp;#039;m a moody bitch&amp;quot;\u2014and so what? Yet why micromanage your image to the extent Beckham does if you don&amp;#039;t care what people think? &amp;quot;I do have my insecurities,&amp;quot; she admits. &amp;quot;Maybe that is why I look a little bit serious. The kind of person who&amp;#039;s going to stand on the red carpet and love the attention and have the big grin\u00AD\u2014I&amp;#039;m just not like that. I want to get in there, do what I&amp;#039;ve got to do, and get home to my kids.&amp;quot;  In America, Beckham has found ways to chip away at her frosty persona\u2014last year&amp;#039;s Marc Jacobs ads, with Victoria and those miles of legs poking out of an enormous shopping bag being one example. She took a break from the ELLE shoot to watch her husband charm the pants off Regis and Kelly, on whose show he was subjected to a clip of the hosts doing their best Posh &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; Becks impression. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m Posh,&amp;quot; announced a scantily clad Kelly Ripa in an Eliza Doolittle accent. &amp;quot;I nevah, evah smile.&amp;quot; Both Beckhams\u2014he on TV, she watching him on TV\u2014chuckled. In L.A., Romeo&amp;#039;s eyes were glued to the screen. &amp;quot;Romeo, do Mummy,&amp;quot; Beckham said. He giggled. &amp;quot;No, you know Mummy doesn&amp;#039;t smile!&amp;quot; she said, poking him. Romeo straightened up and struck a pitch-perfect Posh face: smoldering eyes and sucked-in cheeks. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s better!&amp;quot; she said, laughing. But by the time she was back in front of the camera, she was making the face herself.  CHECK OUT THE OCTOBER ISSUE OF ELLE FOR THE FULL STORY ON VICTORIA BECKHAM "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a10535/victoria-beckham-380604/>