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"She's growing up," said Ken Downing, the fashion director of Neiman Marcus, and an early advocate of Beckham's designs. "Her knowledge of dressmaking is impressive. She understands how to bring out the best in the female form and that's one reason our clients are drawn to what she does." Good clothes are a necessary part of a life spent basking in the public eye. Beckham has cavorted for the camera in the Mediterranean-style villa in Beverly Hills, Calif., that she shares with her husband, a home filled with art by Damien Hirst, Sam Taylor-Wood and Tracey Emin. She has sashayed from fashion runways to high-profile advertising campaigns and appeared on TV shows, including Ugly Betty and American Idol. Her life - the feverishly documented spending sprees, the star turns on the red carpet, the clamor for her designs - may be enviable, but she wants you to know it has left her unspoiled. "Doing diva," she said in London in June, "that's completely pointless." Insiders powerful enough to score an invitation to her intimate spring 2011 showing this month may well take her at her word. She is a woman aglow in, although not overtly dazzled by, her own success, one who serves as the commentator for her shows - confessing, rather disarmingly, her relative ignorance. "Look, it's a basic way that I am doing this," she said last season. "Technically, it's probably not the right way." Her dresses, once so corseted that they gave off a whiff of kitsch, are loosening up, exuding at times a patrician breeziness.