The unique shoe designs of Tabitha Simmons reflect her transatlantic life

There are worse things to be greeted by on a Monday morning. A beautiful Tabitha Simmons sits with her team in the Four Seasons lobby lounge, looking incredibly fresh considering she has just flown in from New York.

Wearing her shiny black hair loose, and with barely a stitch of make-up on, she sports an embellished black top, skinny trousers and a pair of her sexy, black lace-up booties.

Simmons, who is visiting Hong Kong for the first time, is a picture of urban elegance, and her eponymous brand's best marketing tool.

"I used to work [styling] and consulting for Alexander McQueen and Calvin Klein, and often you'd start from the very beginning," the English designer and ex-model says of her first experience in footwear. "Lee [McQueen] would do a sketch and we'd have to make that sketch three-dimensional.

"I got to work on the structure, and whether it would be a thick heel, or different silhouettes. That's when the passion for shoes really arrived. I became fascinated, as I felt that the shoes defined the whole silhouette," she says.

The international stylist is now most famous for her footwear label, and she has won a Council of Fashion Designers of America award and a British Fashion Award since starting her label in 2009. Simmons grew up in the English countryside (there is still no hint of American in her accent, even though she has lived in New York for many years) and began her fashion work at Dazed and Confused magazine in London.

She moved to New York to take on the fashion editor role at V Magazine, and later worked at Vogue. She recalls that she'd been talking about doing her own shoe line for a while, but it was her friend Jefferson Hack, editor of Dazed and Confused, who introduced her to the Veneto footwear workshops and factories where all her designs are now made.