Spice Girls’ Nicknames Didn’t Stick Until International Fame Changed the Game: ‘Caricatures of Ourselves’ (Exclusive)

Melanie “Mel C” Chisholm is looking back at the Spice Girls’ signature.

The nicknames that set the tone for the five ladies’ personas with fans came from a magazine editor’s suggestion, Mel C reveals in a recent sitdown with PEOPLE.

Looking back at a clipping explaining the girls’ nicknames from Top of the Pops Magazine, Mel C explained that the iconic British show was actually responsible for the monikers given to herself, Geri Halliwell, Melanie “Mel B” Brown, Victoria Beckham and Emma Bunton.

“Top of the Pops was an iconic British music show. It’s the show we all grew up watching, like longing to be on it. Now, the editor of this, a guy called Peter Loraine, he said, ‘You girls, you need nicknames,’ ” she recalled.

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“So we came up with all these crazy nicknames to launch, but he came up with these names… you know the names, right? But it was just a silly article, these little pots of spice with our nicknames — Scary, Baby, Posh, Ginger, Sporty.”

Despite the fact that they saw the nicknames as “just a throwaway thing,” they became so much more as the Spice Girls gained international fame.

“We laughed at it. But when we came here, to the U.S., everybody kept calling us by these nicknames, and it just kind of stuck. And we loved it. We just really embraced it, and we became caricatures of ourselves.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Mel C opened up about the signature looks that added to those personas, which came after some trial and error among the five.

“We were trying to figure out how we wanted to dress, and we went through all these phases… The first management that had auditioned us really wanted us to be uniformed, to have a look, a cohesive look. And that always meant that somebody was uncomfortable,” she explained.

“There was always someone who didn’t feel quite right. We were rehearsing, and one day, Geri looked in the mirror. And I had a trackie on, and she had one of her crazy outfits on, and Victoria had a nice little dress on. She was like, ‘Why don’t we just wear what we wear, how we feel comfortable?’ And that’s really how the individuality thing shone through.”