"Not many designers are too happy to design both for the Clash and Gieves & Hawkes, but I've always started from a traditional stand- point and then subverted it in that English way. It's all about going from Benjamin Britten to Little Britain." It's all about Joe Casely-Hayford, father of fusion tailoring - his signature blend of street style and the sartorial. And now head of a family business. Having worked with his wife Maria, "who [he] met at fashion college about 100 years ago," he has now been joined by his 23-year-old son and art historian Charlie, and has sheared the brand of its "Joe" prefix in recognition. "Well," says Casely- Hayford, "Charlie pretty much grew up in the studio so I guess it was inevitable he'd be drawn to fashion. Being a proper family business now means we never really stop working, but it's fantastic."Casely-Hayford is now in the family way in another sense too, as he has a new collabo- ration with John Lewis, for whom he has worked with a spread of Britain's finest names in clothing - including Cheaney, Barbour and Liberty - to create a line of special garments. "The aim is to provide the opportu- nity for people to buy clothes on a par with the quality of, well, all the white goods they seem to like buying there..."

That may not be the stuff of high glamour, but attitudes to designers dipping toes into high- street waters have changed since Casely-Hayford became the first designer to create a line for Topshop 20 years ago. Indeed, despite his relatively low media profile, Casely- Hayford is a designer involved with more pies than he has fingers for. Collaborations are currently afoot with Barney's, Isetan and Comme des Garçons in Japan - where, as with so many more British design outsiders, Casely-Hayford is feted - and a history that has taken him from shaping the look of bands (U2 and Oasis followed Strummer & co.), exhibition design for the Barbican, uniform design for Conran restaurants and creative director- ship of Gieves & Hawkes. "Fashion design is not as airy-fairy as it is sometimes perceived as being," he says. "We tend to think of ourselves as more product designers than fashion designers now. The fact that we've always worked with a kind of fusion style has made us hard to pigeonhole, but that's given the business longevity. We make the kind of clothes that could be worn by a 60-year-old or an 18-year-old. I'm wearing something I designed 10 years ago. Now my son is trying to steal it from me."Casely-Hayford almost escaped fashion altogether. On graduating he worked as a buyer, but disillusionment set in when all he found himself being asked to do was to buy up other designers' collections so they could be taken apart and copied. So he opened an antiques shop. But when a client discovered a warehouse full of WWII tent fabric and suggested Casely- Hayford make something with it, and the resulting jackets, shirts and skirts sold out, the Joe Casely-Hayford line was born. He set up a studio in London's Shoreditch area - back when it was more ditch than hotspot - and has stayed. But much has changed.

"There's been a significant change in the way men look at clothes, for example, especially in recent years," says Casely-Hayford. "There's more colour, texture and experiment with proportion now, thank god, and ideas are commu- nicated much faster on the internet. But that's also killed the more regional trends that were a strong part of youth culture in my young days - when men in London and Manchester actually dressed differ- ently. There's that 'homogenous youth' look now. I'm not so keen on that, not in a country that has always had such a distinctive mix of tradi- tion and anarchy."

"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...