"There's two things in life you should spend money on: your bed and your shoes, because if you're not in one, you're in the other."

Engaging, charming and difficult to argue with, George Glasgow has the salesman's magic patter down pat - which is no surprise. Whether at the GJ Cleverley shoe shop in central London where he's worked for 40 years, or on one of his biannual overseas odysseys into new territory, he meets demanding gentlemen of means who are prepared to spend a couple of grand on a truly personal pair of shoes.

"I always say to people, 'My feet, your feet - no two pairs are the same,'" he explains a few days before leaving for a three-week tour of duty in America. Fully bespoke hand- stitched shoes are snugger and lighter than those bought off the shelf - being measured to fit a specific individual means they're fitted round the heel, thinner in the middle and generally closer to the form and contours of the foot than other men's shoes. Making them takes around three months and a lot of labour too, and that, plus the price, is partly why they have such a select modern audience; and why shoe trees - crucial for putting a pair on properly - are more often seen on antique stalls than in home hallways these days.

"A lot of younger guys will go for the label and the label will sell anything," Glasgow says. "Our clien- tele don't want to be dictated to like that, or limited to what's being pushed at that time. I'm still seeing customers that I first saw 30 years ago." These days, they come to the shop in London's Royal Arcade, with its on-site work- shop where the bespoke shoes are made. Cleverley first set up his own shop on a street round the corner in 1958 - having already established his name during his years at nearby shoe-maker Tuczek, where he'd developed the flatter-toed Cleverley style that Nureyev, Churchill and Bogart soon made famous. "I'm the happiest guy in the world," Glasgow says. "I can't wait to come in each morning."

Nevertheless, for a couple of months of each year, he's not moving between the Mayfair shop and his Chelsea home, but visiting customers across the USA in a series of what the Americans call trunk shows - "New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, Palm Beach, we do eight to ten now. I've been going there for 32 years, and I've been going to Japan for 20. When I first went to Japan they'd probably never seen English shoes like this, so it took a little bit of talking but then everybody went mad for them."

That's not to say it's all about keeping up endangered traditions - the Cleverley range includes foot- wear of all kinds, and was recently updated with several intricate styles based on those created by another Cleverley, one whose well-heeled list of famous admirers, including Hubert de Givenchy and the Rothschilds, rivalled that of his less reclusive uncle. "I worked with George," Glasgow explains, "and George had a nephew called Anthony, and Anthony was a shoemaker himself. He worked from home and he had a very, very prestigious clientele. People used to say George's toe shape was square but it wasn't - as George used to say, it was just 'suspiciously square.' What Anthony did, he defined that a little bit more and made it more of a chisel."

It's probably just as well that he had the same surname. Uncle George - like Glasgow, John Carnera and the rest of the team to whom he entrusted his name - was not diffident about the virtues of making shoes his way. "George always said, 'people who know about shoes come to Cleverley.'"

Fat lines and fashionability boast a long history of perceived interrelat- edness, even if the reality is more often one of abject tedium and epic self-absorption. So we're most grateful for those whose work has conferred a certain cool on East London illustra- tion collective, publisher and retailer Nobrow. Thick, inky, life-affirming, unpredictable and free of synthetic bulking agents, the lines drawn by Nobrow's artists speak of excitement and enthusiasm, while the wider enterprise is largely dedicated to championing talents other than the staff's own.

"I'm not very stylish today," Sam Arthur warned O: Man on the phone as we headed to Nobrow HQ to take his photograph, "I've got gaffer tape keeping my hoodie together..." But that, of course, is part of the point: these are dedicated, hands-on workshop types, not fashion fops or digital designers who operate in a world without drips and stains. Along with co-founder Alex Spiro - long- time friend, fellow illustrator and "dictionary definition of an eBay junkie" - Arthur set up Nobrow's studio in late 2008 in a former commercial space at 62 Great Eastern Street, Hoxton. The following spring, the first issue of Nobrow's eponymous, biannual magazine appeared, and its beautifully printed original artwork from 24 artists and illustrators around the world had an instant impact in design circles.

That impact was largely down to Nobrow's self-evident dedication to beautifully made books and limited edition prints produced with old manual machines and without digital shortcuts. But it was also because - even though they have no rigid

rules about what styles and sensibili- ties are allowed under the Nobrow banner - the poppy, storybook style that characterised many of the artists they first worked with chimed with fashion's recent rediscovery of illus- tration. From the thick-lined T-shirt designs and flyers associated with the super-cool No Age hardcore scene in L.A., through the doodly detours taken by so many hipster tattooists from London to Brooklyn, to the prints on special edition Marni pieces in recent seasons, childlike illustration has lately been deployed in unexpected and chic places as a way of cutting through super-slick, retouched imagery with shots of pure personality.

Now, in late 2010, Nobrow's base- ment hums with the stirring of ink pots and the cranking of defiantly analogue print technology as the fourth issue of the magazine - complete with all new colours, fans! - is readied for a November release. Upstairs, adjoining the collective's studio (a repository of fruit labels, comics, objets d'pop culture and other designery ephemera that testifies to that aforementioned eBay habit) is a dazzling shop front full of primary-coloured prints, tiny- run artist monographs made in the basement, and more. The store opened earlier this year and takes the young imprint into non-papery territory with pillows, collectible figures and other 3D realisations of their friends' illustrated worlds. Latest titles include Spam Head, a pictorial tribute to the imagined faces behind the fictional identities on junk emails received by artist and O: Man contributor Kavel Rafferty. And, until the end of November, you can also see a selling show by Belgian artist Brecht Vandenbroucke during the store's weekday opening hours.

"The shop's going to be chocka with new books, cards, T-shirts and little things for Christmas," Arthur says. But the big ticket item this winter is a grand new book, A Graphic Cosmogony, eight months in the planning and made in collaboration with an Italian printer who's just as particular as the Nobrow mob. Like the magazine, it brings together 24 artists, but on this occasion each has been given seven pages in which to tell the story of creation. "It's the most ambitious thing we've done yet," Arthur says. Even omniscient deities gave themselves Sundays off when undertaking such epic tasks, but judging by their prodigious progress thus far, Nobrow won't even manage a lie-in before moving on to something bigger yet...

"When I'm writing my songs," says Dels, "I'm always thinking about how they could be presented visually to the world. And when I started making music, I always said that I wanted my instrument to be a visual, so in my band I'd be tripping off visuals." In forth- coming single "Trumpalump" he wonders aloud if he's a ghost, and raps about "blowing trees with the Daleks" alongside dozens of other arresting images. The rapper, otherwise known as Kieren Dickins, studied graphic design at Kingston University, and as well as designing the crisp typography of his record covers, he also collaborated with fellow alumni Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor on the video for first single "Shapeshift." This special effects-laden promo is a playful fashion flickbook of crisp menswear styles: a digital collage of a thou- sand patterns, pockets and prints sequenced to music. It shows a bouncing troupe of Dels wearing an almost endless parade of smart outfits from his own wardrobe, as well as costumes that transmog- rify him into a bird, a bear, a dog, a chair, and so on according to the strange visions of his lyrical overflows.

"I wanted to write about my youth, and how bored I was growing up in Ipswich," says Dickins, "but I didn't want it to be really depressing. So I decided to just talk about how it was, and how free you are as a kid, in your mind." Accompanied by squelchy synths from Hot Chip's Joe Goddard, the East Anglian MC delivers fantastical lines like, "Before I picked up the mic and started writing rhymes / I could alter my form at any given time." Not so surprisingly, he describes his dream collaborators as psyche- delic hip hop stars Andre 3000 and DOOM - the London-born super- MC formerly known as MF Doom / King Geedorah / Viktor Vaughn / Zev Love X and so on, who literally wears "a metal face mask with a built-in frown" - whom Dels, along with Jamie Smith of chums the XX, supported on tour this month. In terms of picking up pens, Dickins lists his influences as Alan Fletcher's classic typography and seminal 1980s manga comic Akira. "I was totally obsessed," he says, "Akira was the first Japanese animation I ever saw as a kid, and afterwards my dad took me to the comic store and we bought the book. It was in Japanese so I had to read it from right to left, and I used to sit there for hours just drawing it." And his love for hallucinatory anime extends far beyond Akira's visions of doomsday cults and monstrous teddy bears. "I also really like Hayao Miyazaki, I just love the way he tells stories in such a beautiful way," Dels continues, with reference to the Studio Ghibli director's world of Spitfire-flying pigs and very big cats that are actually buses.

"The video that always stands out in my mind," he says, "is Missy Elliott's 'The Rain.' The one where she's wearing that sort of big ballooning bin-liner - there wasn't really any other R&B or hip hop video like that at the time. It just felt so futuristic..." Dickins' own sartorial taste is more conservative than Missy's fluorescent tracksuits, camouflage sportswear and bejew- elled hyper-bling. "I really like Margiela, and Tom Ford too. But I can't afford the clothes I really want, so I don't delve into it too much, I don't want to tease myself." Fair enough. And until the PRs come- a-calling, Dels can keep drop- ping dream-raps about turning his shape-shifting powers to the cause of looking fresh: "I need some new shoes, about to turn my feet into some Jordan 3s / This skin on my legs forms a pair of denim jeans..."