“I just can’t concentrate in flats,” Victoria Beckham was reported to have said on English breakfast TV in 2008.
The line was instantly memorable, the idea being that it took the sharp spike of a stiletto to focus the fashionista’s attention. In flat shoes, the mind just wandered.
Little wonder then that it’s one of the most famous Victoria Beckham quotes ever, and one of the most memorable shoe-quotes of the 2000s.
The full quote was reported by the Daily Mail at the time as Victoria Beckham saying:
I just can’t concentrate in flats.
I could go to the gym if I wore flats, I’d love to go to the gym, but I just can’t get my head around the footwear.
You would think that for a quote that was supposedly seen by millions of viewers, the video would be easy to find. But the video of the quote is elusive.
Which makes us start to wonder if Victoria ever actually said the words.
Or has Victoria Beckham just joined other famous women such as Marilyn Monroe and Coco Chanel in having a shoe quote attributed to them that they probably didn’t ever say?
When did Victoria Beckham say she couldn’t concentrate in flats?
The Daily Mail reported that the lines were said in the second instalment of an exclusive interview with GMTV Today, a weekday breakfast magazine program that was broadcast on the UK’s ITV channel between 1993 and 2010.
A lot of this information can be confirmed. Victoria Beckham did do an interview with Fiona Phillips of GMTV Today, and it was broadcast in two parts: May 14 and 15, 2008.
You can see the first instalment of the interview (May 14, 2008) on YouTube:
The introduction to that first instalment confirms that the interview was the only one that Victoria gave while she was in the country, and that it was filmed on the Monday before it aired (May 12, 2008).
Meanwhile the closing segment confirms that the second instalment would air the following day.
In the first instalment, Victoria does not discuss heels or flats or the gym. She talks about husband David’s soccer career and her own reputation for not smiling.
So if Victoria did say the lines, she indeed said them in the second instalment just as the Daily Mail reported.
The trouble is that the only publicly available video of the second instalment doesn’t include the lines. You can see that video here:
There is certainly a discussion about heels in the video. But the problem is that the relevant passage (which begins at the 25 second mark) doesn’t include the quote. What is actually said is this:
Fiona Phillips says: “You know when see pictures of you in the paper shopping, I always think ‘how does she shop with those shoes on?’ You’ve always got high heels on.”
Victoria then replies: “I like wearing high heels. I mean when I’m at home you know I’m always in flats or you know flip-flops that clothing but I’m really girly and you know I like to wear heels. I think it changes the whole way that you hold yourself, the way you feel it changes your confidence. I love tottering around in high heels.”
The two women then totter off to do some shopping. Not a further word about flats is spoken in the clip.
Was the line ever actually said?
There’s only one online transcript we could find of when Victoria Beckham supposedly uttered the remarks. It comes from the now defunct My Park Magazine (archived here).
That transcript has Victoria muttering the immortal line directly after the question by Fiona Phillips that we’ve quoted above. But as the video shows, that simply didn’t happen.
The other thing that is missing from the video is Victoria saying the second part of the alleged quote, namely that she’d love to go to the gym but she can’t get her head around the footwear.
The video of the second instalment of the interview does include a discussion about the gym but there’s no talk about the flat shoes required to attend it.
Now it is possible that Victoria did say “I just can’t concentrate in flats” in a piece that preceded the conversation shown in the video (the video of the second instalment does not start right at the beginning). And perhaps there were two conversations about the gym, but only one was included.
We don’t think this is likely though. At the places you would expect the quotes to appear – and the places that the only available transcript says they appeared – they do not.
Until the video actually surfaces, we think that the “just can’t concentrate in flats” line is not something that Victoria Beckham actually said. Which is kind of a shame really.
However even if there isn’t video publicly available of the famous mouthful, we can confidently say that Posh Spice (as she was once known) re-embraced the “can’t concentrate in flats” line a decade on.
In 2019, Victoria Beckham put out a slogan t-shirt with the line “I can’t concentrate in flats” on the front.
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Title image credit: Owl Bridge Media, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
