When I speak to Christopher Shannon, he has just reached his favourite part of the creative process: the moment where he realizes he’s got it wrong and starts all over again. With a fortnight to go before his spring 2014 show on Tuesday.

‘I’ve got this habit where I design the whole collection and then redesign it again because I hate it,’ he says. ‘I don’t understand why I can’t get it right first time – this is our twelfth show, and I do it every time.’

It doesn’t seem to have had any adverse effects so far. Shannon’s is one of the most exciting and anticipated names on the London Collections: Men schedule, which kicks off today. His clothes are popular, accessible and cool, while also technically precise and subtly subversive. And, even better, they sell too.

‘Early on, people said it was all sportswear, but we always sold loads of shirts, and they were really well finished and made in Italy,’ Shannon says of the initial response to his modern take on casual clothing and structured separates. ‘So I don’t know who my customer is. I think it’s better not to guess, because otherwise you’re constrained by an idea.’

"The noise gets taken up by people making second-hand statements about luxury"

The collection currently being overhauled is an exploration of weight in innovative techno- and performance fabrics, inspired not by the future but by Shannon’s own past.

‘I’ve played with a part of my life that I’d put behind me and forgotten about – when I left school at 16 and found salvation in the club scenes of Liverpool and Manchester. Cream, Garlands, Paradise. It had kind of moved on from rave-y to quite dressy, but it was a very good period for me and I got rid of the shackles of being at school.’

Synthetic materials, block colours, glitter. ‘It’s very, very particular,’ he explains. ‘It’s a 70s shirt from a vintage shop with a PVC trouser. There’s no point taking a really cool reference – you’ve got to start with the worst thing possible so you can make something out of it.’

It’s typical of Shannon to take an era in which other labels are also currently dabbling and choose to focus on one of its most esoteric components. Most important in every collection, for him, is ‘relevance’, something he believes comes from imbuing the clothes with his own personality.

Trained at Central Saint Martins, where he was classmates with Mary Katrantzou and Michael van der Ham, Shannon is part of a vanguard of young designers in the capital carving their names into the menswear scene, more rowdy than Savile Row but no less precise or expert. His innovative use of fabric, texture and weight has in the past led to panelled, banded and pom-pom bedecked shirting, part sheer, part dandified nylon, and finished and made pragmatic with sporty detailing.

Although he has the technical skills for tailoring, his pieces more often veer into streetwear territory – he has an entire diffusion line, Kidda, which deals in simple and printed jersey separates that are as suitable for the rudeboys of South London as they are for nerdy East End hipsters. Shannon’s great talent is the universality of his pieces, as proven by the number of women who buy them too.

‘We’ve noticed the smaller sizes always sell out really fast,’ he nods, ‘which I think is girls buying them.’ Last season, there were three female models in his show, on whom the lightweight nylons and baggy, cargo-inspired trackpants looked right at home, prompting speculation that Shannon would be the next of several fledgling London labels to find success by diversifying across both markets.

‘We tested the water with it last year,’ he continues. ‘I really wanted to see what it looked like next to the menswear, but I felt like I hadn’t done enough of a range. I think it’s another two seasons off. I was offered a full women’s show and I just thought, ‘it’s not me, I’m just hyping myself, it’s not going to make my life any better, it’s going to make me busier.’

Hype annoys Christopher Shannon, something you’ll know if you follow his straight-talking, doesn’t-suffer-fools-gladly bon mots on Twitter, where he discusses everything from the state of the industry to filing his tax returns with characteristic sardonic and studied grumpiness.

‘Oh, I’m just a bit sore sometimes,’ he laughs. ‘My friends say ‘it’s business, you can’t use it like that.’ But I wasn’t going to set it up and leave people dying of boredom.’

So when he isn’t grousing about London transport, there’ll be a thinly veiled naught comment about, say an industry personality or something that he perceives to be vacuous or devoid of meaning. Often coruscating, he’s actually terribly refreshing, given the pomposity and jargonistic smuggery the medium often engenders.

‘I just don’t subscribe to that,’ he says. ‘The noise gets taken up by people making second-hand statements about luxury… Ooh, that was a hard line, wasn’t it? But even in London, I see Balenciaga being ripped off and I don’t understand what the work is. I see the reference and nothing else, and the people I adore are the ones who put loads of personality into their work.’

"Fashion is so open at the moment, there's no mystique - I don't know if that's any good for the work."

‘It feels like quite an embarrassing time to be in fashion,’ he continues, citing Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela as examples whose authenticity he admires. ‘It’s so open at the moment, there’s no mystique. It feels a bit like a tacky circus and I don’t know if that’s good for the work, really, because it just becomes commodity.’

In the face of that. Shannon’s line is notable for its wit and knowing self-mockery. ‘The clothes are quite funny,’ he says. ‘Not in a comedy way, but it’s the way we work in the studio: we try to find the surprise element that feels amusing.’

The pom poms? I ask.

‘At that point, I was so tired I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just had this instinct and risked it.’

It paid off – those shirts sold out in weeks and made Shannon’s name known to a far wider audience. And this season will be no different, although the designer himself is far too modest – or tired – to admit that.