I was sitting with Victoria Beckham in New York and she was telling me about the date her husband had planned. “David and I were vacationing in Java and he had planned the most romantic dinner,” she said, sipping her afternoon espresso coffee. “We were in the middle of a rice field, just the two of us having dinner. At 21:50, the sun set, and all the rice fields were lit up with little candles. She was drinking tea in the rice field. It was designed to set up lights, it’s a very beautiful surprise.
It was that romantic moment that inspired the fourth fragrance in the Beckham collection, aptly named 21:50 Reverie. (For us Americans, that’s 9:50 p.m.) The scent debuted today at the designer’s Spring/Summer 2025 show in Paris. Inside the Château de Bagatelle, a neoclassical residence built in 1720, guests sat on grass-colored carpets while the catwalk was reminiscent of that moment in Indonesia — a white runway with models like Gigi Hadid as the main course. Naturally, 21:50 comes with its vanilla base sprinkled randomly into the air like candy.
“There are a lot of vanilla fragrances out there, but I wanted ours to be inspired by nature,” says Beckham, who probably used her fair share of overly sweet vanilla scents during the peak of their popularity in the ’90s. “This fragrance is usually very sweet and feminine. But there’s something unexpected about ours, the grassy notes that make it a masculine version of vanilla. That’s part of my brand’s DNA, the blend of masculinity and femininity. The cedar and plum complete it,” she says of the fragrance, giving it a “heavy grassy flavor.”
Even the deep green color of the bottle — “I’ve always been obsessed with getting the perfect color for each bottle, which is a custom hue that even matches the color of my bathroom walls.” — reminds me of time spent in the lush tropics.
Being a longtime Beckham fan, I had to ask her what she wore that particular night at Java. “I wore a short denim skirt and a simple navy tank top,” she said. “Simple and plain romance.”
21:50 Reverie Eau de Parfum will be released on October 3. Pre-orders are now available here.
