“The minute I see a camera, I change,” Victoria Beckham said in the recent Netflix documentary tracing her trajectory from Spice Girl to fashion designer. “The barrier goes up, my armor goes on, and that’s when the miserable cow who doesn’t smile comes out.” Miserable, though, feels like a misnomer to anyone who has seen Beckham doing anything. Such as: teasing her aspiring-musician son Cruz about her 100-million-album past, or complaining that Jennifer Lopez doesn’t do “bins” as husband David films her bagging up the kitchen rubbish.

Still, the role of “miserable” fashionista is one Beckham has taken on with method-like gusto, once explaining to Vogue that she avoids smiling because she has “a responsibility to the fashion community.” And wasn’t it in 2017 that she arrived at LAX in a t-shirt reading “Fashion Stole My Smile?” Well, that slogan proved apt last night, when she was photographed in New York with the entire lower half of her face swallowed by a funnel-neck trench coat—talk about “the barrier [going] up”—styled with platform-skimming trousers, and an Hermès Birkin. It would hardly be surprising if fashion’s foremost comedian had, in fact, flashed her toothiest grin beneath that collar.

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The coat in question is from Victoria Beckham’s fall 2024 collection—she also wore a version of it on a trip to Paris in November—and the silhouette remains a major trend 12 months on. The look can be traced back to Phoebe Philo’s years at Chloé, which the designer later revived in her debut collection for her own eponymous label in 2023, before it filtered into the collections of Stella McCartney, Chloé, Khaite, and the street-style galleries populated by people wanting to be looked at but not necessarily seen—a feeling Beckham herself summed up in the Netflix documentary: “I’m smiling on the inside, but no one ever sees it.”