I first met designer Claire Barrow in 2011, when she was a fourth-year fashion student at the University of Westminster and I was one of a panel, critiquing her final project.

By then (aged 21, it’s worth adding), she had already had her customised and hand-painted vintage leather biker jackets shot by i-D and Vogue, worn in the latter by supermodel Agyness Deyn. Rihanna has been seen in her designs. There didn’t seem to be much more advice I could give her.

‘It was so fast, there wasn’t much thought in it,’ Barrow says, when I ask her how she managed it – to go from student to showing her first on-schedule collection at London Fashion Week nine months later.

‘Since my graduate collection, everything that I do now has to be really great,’ she continues, matter of fact. ‘I don’t do anything half-heartedly. I put a lot of my self into my work.’

Barrow is elfin and bird-like, with a shock of bleach hair and dozens of jingling bracelets and cuffs on her bony wrists. She’s the missing link between Debbie Harry and Grimes. And just as tough, too, articulate about her designs, and speaking as forcefully about her ideas in person as her illustrations do from the clothes they decorate.

She started out buying up vintage jackets and drawing her spriggy florals and gaping-mouthed rag-doll figures onto them as bespoke commissions for hip characters from London’s East End – something she hasn’t had time to do since she started up her own business as such, but that she wants to get back to one day.

The music video made especially for Barrow's MatchesFashion collaboration, featuring girl band Skinny Girl Diet

It was these pieces for which Fashion East’s Lulu Kennedy noticed her, not realising she was still studying, and invited her to join the mentoring scheme which has, in the past, supported the likes of Henry Holland and Gareth Pugh.

‘By the time she was in the final year so many fashion editors and buyers already knew who she was, and couldn’t believe she was still at university,’ says her course director at Westminster Andrew Groves. ‘We usually start on final collections at Westminster in January, but instead Claire was producing a collaboration line with Joseph which was to be stocked in Paris and London in time for fashion week. So she was doing that and also sorting production and reorders.’

This time, when I meet Barrow, she is with her mum, down from Stockton-on-Tees for the launch of her capsule with MatchesFashion – a range of jackets and bags featuring those familiar Tippex-y squiggles. She remembers when her daughter always dreamed of having her own fashion line.

‘When she was 12, she used to sit drawing clothes and a label next to them. And then when she decided to go to fashion college, she got the highest marks… You did!’

Barrow grimaces, and laughs. ‘I’ve just thrown myself into working really hard at university,’ she admits. ‘It’s not even that I’m interested in clothing, it’s more the idea of it.’

She is fuelled by ideas and motivated by themes, passionate about subcultures, urban tribes and fascinated by the notion of belonging to a group. First it was the jackets and the notion of conveying the wearer’s personality in their chosen doodles. And then, for her first collection at Fashion East, it was the notion of a generation adrift, having lost its identity.

‘It was based around alcohol packaging, because I felt like there’s nothing new coming out anymore. Everything’s recycled from things that have already been. That’s why the alcohol packaging was in the collection. I just thought people drink and that’s sort of it. We need a new movement to happen.’

‘There hasn’t been anything exciting since chav,’ she declares, and I immediately feel ancient because I hadn’t even realised that was a thing beyond all the Daily Mail class-venom. ‘There’s not been anything like a subculture that’s a thing in its own right.’

While Barrow might be the creative voice of that generation, she is far from its paradigm. After all, she has successfully – miraculously, even, given the climate – navigated one of the worst times in recent history for youth unemployment. Talking to her, it’s obvious she isn’t one of the industry’s many opportunistic young scenesters.

‘Creating new movements for young people is what brings things forward,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily ‘punk’ – that’s written too much. I’m doing a collection for MatchesFashion, after all, and that’s a luxury brand.

She is wearing the leather ‘embers’ jacket from it, and it seems meant for her.

‘It’s my favourite, she admits. ‘I’ve created three different gangs to express different characters. So you haven’t got a hand-painted individual jacket, but you’re part of a really cool gang. So it’s not so bad to not be an individual, because you’re part of something that expresses you.’

‘I want it to be important,’ she says of her work. ‘I don’t want to be just another designer.’

Last season at Fashion East saw her presenting marble-effect full-skirted looks and dishevelled knitwear; one model wore a matching lampshade on her head, and another carried a perfectly realized fish as a handbag. It looked a bit like one of those singing Billy Bass robots, but infinitely cooler.

That Barrow isn’t keen on constricting herself with labels or aesthetics or definitions is clear enough; it’s also what makes her such a strong talent, with a vision that can suit both high-end and low, counter-cultural and commercial. And all the while, she has the integrity of an artist, swerving things she doesn’t feel are pushing her and taking on challenges that will.

The fact that it’s still barely two years since she left university would, with any other designer, be a talking point. With Barrow though, the clothes speak for themselves.

Claire Barrow will show at London Fashion Week as part of Fashion East on Tuesday; her capsule for MatchesFashion is available now