Just when you think you have seen everything in British men’s fashion, a model walks down the catwalk wearing a shrunken version of an inflatable fancy-dress costume depicting the grotesque Austin Powers character Fat Bastard.

That is the plan, anyway, when Rottingdean Bazaar – one of the standout stars of London Fashion Week: Men’s, which kicked off on Saturday – presents its autumn/winter 2018 collection on Sunday.

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British menswear is well known for eccentric design – this is, after all, where Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren made bondage trousers with bum flaps a fashion consideration – but Rottingdean Bazaar pushes the boundaries by any standards. The label is a fitting highlight of this season’s London menswear shows, which the British Fashion Council have billed as “a celebration of creative diversity”.

In three seasons the label, which is designed by James Theseus Buck and Luke Brooks, has built up a surreal and witty back catalogue. They have covered models in rubber recreations of pliers, scissors, nails and spanners. They have celebrated the modest romance of the laundry basket, heat-pressing sports socks and tights on to T-shirts and dresses. They have created life-sized replicas of garden implements, and stitched them on to dresses. They have even recreated Che Guevara in pubic hair on a T-shirt.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The modest romance of the laundry basket’ – socks and other undergarments are heat-pressed onto clothes Photograph: Rottingdean Bazaar

Sunday’s show centres on the improbable idea of “boiling down” giant inflatable fancy-dress costumes to create shrunken garments, a technique Brooks compares to “putting a packet of crisps in the oven”. So Fat Bastard becomes “shrivelled and antique-ish,” while a cylindrical football-shaped costume, designed to cover the whole body, is withered to the size of a jumper.

Further inflatable costumes under consideration include a T-Rex, a bodybuilder and a skeleton. There is also a costume which “looks like a granny is carrying you. We are about to boil that one now”, says Brooks, speaking on the phone from the brand’s namesake home of Rottingdean, East Sussex, a week before the show. “It’s a process we find really interesting,” he adds. “Quite a simple technique, which could be applied as a system, in which the technique dictates the outcome.”

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Clearly, this is a long way from the pin-sharp Savile Row tailoring that made British menswear famous. But while Rottingdean Bazaar might appear destined for life as a cult fascination, the label has begun to attract mainstream attention.

In November Rita Ora wore a Rottingdean Bazaar dress decorated with a replica garden rake on stage at the MTV Europe Music awards. This baffled the Daily Mail, which ran the headline: “‘When you’re hosting but need to dig up your potatoes straight after’: Rita Ora confuses fans by wearing a gardening tool as a necklace”.

Brooks’s analysis of the look isn’t markedly different: “I grew up in a few different villages and it reminded me of summer fairs and parades.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rottingdean Bazaar’s pressed flower sweatshirt sold well in Selfridges. Photograph: Rottingdean Bazaar

The label has sold well in Selfridges (a collection of pressed flowers sealed on to sweatshirts showed how wearable it can be), and has a collaboration with Melissa shoes in the offing. It has even been featured in a publication not known for its appreciation of the esoteric, Now magazine. “That was one of our favourite moments,” says Brooks. “We got a full page on the model Max Allen covered in rubber pieces. We were really happy about that. They said funny things about it – ‘babe magnet’ and ‘fashion gets freaky’.”

Brooks, who is 31, grew up in Hertfordshire. Buck, 28, grew up in Rottingdean and Brighton. They met while studying at Central Saint Martins in London, and got together properly when they were both cast in a video by the artist Julie Verhoeven (“she needed hairy people,” says Brooks. “We are both really hairy.”) For a while, after graduation, Buck worked for Kanye West’s label, Yeezy, in LA, “which was funny,” says Buck, “but while I was there I thought ‘we should be working together’” so he left LA and moved to Rottingdean with Brooks, to a tiny studio flat bought by Buck’s mother in the 90s, which was “the only option, because neither of us had any money and we didn’t know what we were doing”.

Buck’s grandmother ran a gift shop on the Rottingdean high street which inspired the “local” shop in The League of Gentlemen. “There’s a clip from Comedy Map of Britain on YouTube,” says Brooks, “when the writer comes back to her shop and talks about feeling really unwelcome.” Their own slightly League of Gentlemen-ish focus on the bizarre and eerie may suggest that their interest in Rottingdean is fetishistic, but the truth is much broader than that.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The ketchup badge from Rottingdean Bazaar’s Badge Taste collection. Photograph: Rottingdean Bazaar

Though born out of necessity, their Rottingdean base has become the centre of their design ethos. “Working from home in a small domestic setting, where the surrounding is very suburban, affects how the work is. It is modest, scale-wise,” says Brooks. An early project, Badge Taste, was a case in point: a collection of badges, featuring squashed cigarette butts, ketchup packets and pubic hair encased in plastic (the pubic hair version, says Brooks, reminded them of “the lockets of hair in Victorian times”).

The village has also provided direct inspiration. The press release for Sunday’s show will be stapled inside a copy of the monthly circular Rottingdean Village News, with whom the pair are in talks for a monthly style page; they are also talking about doing a fashion film with their local zumba class. “There is all sorts of interesting local history about this village,” says Brooks, who talks about the waxworks in the library museum and alumni such as Rudyard Kipling and Edward Burne-Jones.

Buck and Brooks represent a growing movement of artists and designers – including their former classmate, the much-celebrated womenswear designer Matty Bovan, based in York – who do not buy the received wisdom that creative types must work in London.

Brooks puts this shift down to the internet, as much as soaring rents and ever more perilous student finances. “The internet is taking us back to a hamlet state, even if just on a personal level,” he says, “where you can be in a little tribe in the middle of nowhere.”

Buck talks about meeting collaborators on Instagram, rather than having to be in an urban centre to make contacts. In the Amazon Prime era, it doesn’t much matter what time your local Tesco shuts.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rottingdean Bazaar co-founders Luke Brooks and James Theseus Buck. Photograph: Lily Bertrand-Webb

The internet has also bred a hyper-authentic aesthetic into which Rottingdean Bazaar’s approach sits. The pair also work as stylists, and the images they create are raw and extraordinary. Typical shoots have featured Andrew Knox, a pole dancing enthusiast from Suffolk, wearing a Balenciaga trench or on the pole in knee-high black patent Fiorucci boots.

“There has been a massive shift that has really affected catwalk fashion. Pre-internet, you would see interesting, vivid visual characters in films and pop music – elusive fantastical people – which gave rise to a more epic, stylised view. Whereas now the most elusive and fantastical are often those who pop up on Instagram and look amazing, but not necessarily luxurious,” says Brooks.

They say their politics is a work in progress, but they are egalitarian in their approach. Brooks says the duo have no plans for growth, only for collaboration (they proudly say they have “never even hired an intern”). Rather than build an empire, they plan to collaborate with other brands and designers. For the most part they eschew luxury fashion for something that can look very DIY, even if it isn’t, of which Brooks says: “We love the idea of sending out the message that it’s good to DIY yourself, of promoting creativity in general, not just trying to sell stuff, but participating in fashion in an academic way.”

Which isn’t to say that they can’t sell fashion items, from time to time, too. Their biggest commercial hit so far? The pubic hair badge, of course.