Why David and Victoria Beckham have a thing for Hong Kong

Fashion is always changing, says Victoria Beckham. “I’m getting older and I like to wear different things. My personal style has loosened up quite a bit. And how I dress of course influences my label. We started out with a collection of fitted dresses and now it’s really a full wardrobe.”

Still perfectly put together at 42, the pop star turned fashion designer’s look has evolved, and so has her take on fashion. Her hair is now wavy and chopped to chin length, and at New York Fashion Week last month, she took her bow at the show in a masculine striped shirt, belted cream slacks and flat sandals.

“As a person, she’s very honest, smart and straight­forward and has a very good sensibility in what looks good in design – all aspects not just fashion,” says Hong Kong-based tycoon Bruce Rockowitz, who is friend and business partner to Beckham and her husband, David. “Of course, I was around during the Spice Girls, but it’s like she has had two lives. She reinvented herself so successfully as a designer, to an extent that no other ex-pop star or celebrity has been able to do. She lives and breathes fashion.”

While women’s fashion has undoubtedly become more liberated, only someone like Beckham could unwittingly send the internet into meltdown by playfully admitting she preferred flats over heels in “a shocking revelation”, as MailOnline called it in February.

“I’ve said things in the past tongue-in-cheek and it’s been taken literally – I’ve said that I can’t concen­trate in flat shoes, as a joke, but people take you very seriously,” she laughs as we chat in a room at Duddell’s in Central during her trip to Hong Kong earlier this year. “It was bizarre because I said that off the record, too. But yes, I do wear a lot of flats now. When you’re working as much as we’re all working, I’m not going to totter around all the time. I still like a heel, but often I just want to be more comfortable.”