‘I was sitting with Cara Delevingne and her sister and this other model in this really swanky hotel in Paris,’ Simeon Farrar says, laughing, ‘and I remember thinking, ‘How did I get here?’ … I find myself thinking that quite a lot.’

Thirty-eight-year-old designer Simeon Farrar didn’t take the traditional route into the fashion industry – you won’t find any mention of Central Saint Martins or indeed any fashion qualifications at all on his CV – but rather he arrived through a willingness to explore his creativity in a variety of media after graduating with a fine art degree.

‘I always combined print-making with my paintings,’ he says. ‘I’d make screen prints of an album cover, or a book cover I was reading at the time, I was kind of ‘sampling’ something, like the way hip-hop artists do, using other work as a starting point. I started putting these prints onto T-shirts, it was just another surface and they were picked up by London shops. It started off as an artistic decision, painting on T-shirts, and the more shops wanted to buy it, the more I had to adapt, become more of a product rather than an art piece. That adaptation has taken me to where I am now.’

Where he is now is a man with two fashion labels: the eponymous Simeon Farrar line, founded in 2004, comprises T-shirts, dresses and scarves, all hand-printed in bold colours and patterns in his studio in east London, which are stocked in Harrods, Liberty and international fashion boutiques, while the newer Black Score label features T-shirts emblazoned with pithy phrases and witty sketches drawing from pop culture references. There’s more than one referencing Cara Delevingne and she’s taken to wearing the line regularly (hence the Paris get-together).

Stepping into his studio, just off Shoreditch High Street in east London, feels more like entering a painter’s studio – he specialised in painting at art school in Farnham in Surrey – than a fashion designer’s. There are no sewing machines, for starters. ‘I did teach myself how to sew on my mother’s sewing machine,’ he says, ‘but I was never going to be very good at it … The T-shirts come to us already made.’ There is paint everywhere, on the walls and on the floors – ‘We don’t have any tables or anything. It’s a cowboy way of printing’ – and there are little clusters of paint cans and brushes scattered throughout. Colourful scarves and T-shirts hang from the clothes line drip-drying, a kaleidoscope parade of fashion-meets-art.

So does Farrar believe that fashion can be art? ‘Yes, definitely,’ he says, his quiet voice purposeful. ‘If I didn’t feel that I’d be so bored. I’m an artist. I still feel like I’m an artist even though I’m making fashion … I always wanted to be an artist who does loads of different things, those type of people are the people I’ve always admired throughout art history.’

He admires that spirit in his personal life too, and his girlfriend is the painter Andrea Byrne, who started her career as a fashion illustrator. ‘She trained in fashion and now she’s in the art world so we kind of swapped roles,’ he says, smiling. They live together in Kennington in south London and they do, Farrar admits, ‘talk about work quite a lot’. 

‘With Black Score, a lot of it is silly puns or weird phrases so the way that comes about is from chatting. She would tell you that she’s had most of ideas. Which is kind of true and kind of not.’

It’s all about the blurred lines with Farrar.