New York Fashion Week may have been on excess alert but nobody seems to have told Victoria Beckham. The designer formerly known as Posh Spice chose the opulent Waldorf Towers hotel, the childhood home of the heiress Paris Hilton, to show her second collection to the fashion press.

The clothes worked but the timing could not have been worse: prices begin at £900, for a simple dress, and climb to £5,000, for made-to-order evening wear.

Wearing a pewter silk dress from her collection, Beckham provided an enthusiastic running commentary on the show. The only hiccup in the slick, if rather schoolmarmy set, was when she described a strapless grey cashmere dress as “very Mad Max”. Her press officer jumped to the rescue. “Don’t you mean very Mad Men?” she chirruped, referring to the Fifties-inspired television series about advertising executives. Beckham admitted, with a laugh, that she needed to buy the DVD.

Like Karl Lagerfeld, Beckham unashamedly designs clothes in her own image. The pencil-skirted day dresses in cashmere, fine textured wool and stretch felt are the kind that she has been wearing for several years now. They are not dissimilar to those designed by Roland Mouret, with whom she shares a management company.

Her last collection featured more corsets than a BBC costume drama but this season she has loosened up. Her short Sixties-inspired shifts showed more leg — her other dresses were cut to a demure below-the-knee level — and looked less restricted around the middle. Comfort is something that her customers, who tend to come from Moscow and Dubai, have been requesting.

This time the corsets are optional, available to buy separately, but there are other secrets inside her dresses, such as tiny shoulder pads and panelled stitching. Brand Victoria Beckham is about presenting the perfect image, whatever lies beneath.

Despite striking a rather farcical, antiquated chord with her salon presentation, Beckham managed to breathe more youthfulness into the designs themselves. As well as the short shifts, she included rubberised tweed capes that knotted at the neck, fell loosely around the middle and could look very nice when she’s on her way to the gym.

At the other end of the scale were some dramatic red-carpet gowns that deserve to be worn at the Oscar celebrations on Sunday. In red, black or simple monochrome, they were all cut very long and slim over the body, most with a puddle train and boat neck. Just the sort of unshowy understatement required by this year’s recession-concerned Oscar winners. As long as they hold the diamonds.

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