I’m sitting in New York with Victoria Beckham when she tells me about a date planned by her husband. “David and I found ourselves in Java on vacation and he planned the most romantic dinner,” she says while sipping her afternoon coffee, an espresso, straight. “We were in the middle of this rice field, having dinner just the two of us. At 21:50, just as the sun was setting, all of the rice fields lit up with tiny candles. He had arranged to have tea lights put into the rice fields. It was such a beautiful surprise.”
It’s this romantic moment that has inspired the fourth fragrance in Beckham’s collection, aptly named 21:50 Rêverie. (For those of us Americans, that’s 9:50 p.m.) The scent debuted at the designer’s Spring/Summer 2025 fashion show in Paris earlier today. Inside Château de Bagatelle, a neoclassical home built in 1720, guests sat on grass-colored carpets while the runway was reminiscent of that moment in Indonesia—a white runway with models like Gigi Hadid serving up fashion as the main course. Naturally, 21:50—which has a base note of vanilla—was spritzed generously into the air, like a dessert.
“There are a lot of vanilla fragrances out there, but I wanted ours to smell like it was steeped in nature,” Beckham, who likely wore her fair share of uber-sweet vanilla scents during their peak popularity in the ’90s, says. “That note is typically very sweet and feminine. But there is something unexpected about ours, with the grassy notes, that make it very masculine for a vanilla fragrance. That is very much part of my brand DNA, that balance between masculine and feminine, whether that’s a fragrance or a tailored jacket.” Cedarwood and plum round out the fragrance, giving it “the heavy grass smell in the fragrance that reminds me of when the sun comes out right after a tropical rainstorm,” Beckham says.
Even the deep green shade of the bottle—“I agonize over what is the right tone for each bottle, this is a custom color that is also the shade of my bathroom wall.”—recalls a moment in the lush tropics.
A longtime fan of Beckham’s, I have to ask what she was wearing on that special night in Java. “I had a little cut-off denim skirt and just a simple navy tank top,” she says. “Simple and plain romance.”
