Martyn Bal has shown me up. Looking at the images on his website the morning before I speak to him, I notice that he has his new collection modelled by a man and a woman. Are the clothes meant to be unisex? "No," laughs the 34-year-old menswear designer, "That is actually a guy." Sure enough, taking a second look, I can confirm the creature in question is a red-blooded male - albeit one with baby blonde Marilyn Monroe hair and Cupid bow lips.

A stunt to flummox time-poor journalists this may be, but the casting of such an androgynous model also says a lot about Bal's aesthetic - one honed over a decade of working at the biggest houses in menswear, devel- oping his own self-titled line and now (as of June's shows) becoming Design Director at Versace menswear, where the label's legendary house style meets his own distinct approach.

If Bal himself, dressed today in a tight black vest and skinny jeans topped off with a mop of foppish blonde hair, embodies a kind of androgynous men's style, then so do his own-name designs. He launched his brand three years ago and his autumn/winter '10 collection, partly inspired by Teddy Boy shapes, features classic frock coats with quilted leather detailing - perfect for beating up any soft Mods you might find - but also shirts with extended collars and tailored fits that might appeal to those with a more sensitive side. Bal describes his menswear as "constructed, energetic and poetic" all at once. Inspired by music - "I couldn't design in silence" - he says he is "trying to understand what rock 'n' roll means today."

Bal learned about that quest from the best. Graduating from an MA at the RCA in 2000, Dutch-born Bal came home to his London flat one night to find a fax from Christian Dior - one of only two houses to which he had sent his portfolio. He went to Paris for an interview and was hired as design assistant to Hedi Slimane. Staying for three years, he saw the brand transform into the last word in menswear cool, with razor-sharp tailoring, rock stars, youth culture and a skinny-boy aesthetic all thread to its loom. The collaboration worked, Bal says, because he and Slimane come from the same place. "He took me into his world but his world is my world." And, inevitably, the two designers are often likened to each other. "The comparison annoys me," says Bal, "but I have learnt to live with it. Trying to be someone else is pointless."

Indeed, he is a determined person- ality on his own path. He believes in his brand beyond any criticism or perceptions of what a young designer should be doing. "It's been a fight," Bal admits, referring to starting his brand (whose coats, for example, sell for around £1,200) in a recession. "People think my pieces are expensive for a new brand, but I visualise images like a big fashion house. I have always said I would never do my own collec- tion if it wasn't the same as how a big house would do it."

And the world of super-brands is a world he knows all about. Having worked for Burberry Prorsum and Verri Uomo since leaving Dior, Bal is now in charge of menswear at Versace, a role he performs in addition to holding down his own label. He works closely with Donatella - who he praises for her ability to "create teams of people and get young energy into the brand" - and clearly enjoys juggling two very distinct visions of men today. You might even say he is freakishly organ- ised: when we spoke in October, he had already almost completed the autumn/winter '11 Martyn Bal collec- tion, which will not be shown until January. And we can't wait to see what he does for his second Versace collec- tion either. "It's an evolution of what has come so far," says Bal. "I have to find ways to reinvent the concept all the time." Whereas all we have to do is sit back and admire his work.

"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.'"