The fashion designer Charles Jeffrey is wearing a kilt when I meet him. Granted, he’s Scottish – the 28-year-old grew up in Glasgow – but this is less about nationalism and more about what fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race will know as a “lewk”. The kilt is combined with an oversized leather jacket, chambray shirt, beret, striped football socks and paint-splattered boots held together with bright yellow electrical tape. On his Botticelli-ish face, Jeffrey has added two carefully positioned beauty spots with a kohl pencil. The overall effect is striking. It will provoke some quizzical glances from the ice-skating tourists at Somerset House in London, where Jeffrey’s studio is.

Since launching his label, Loverboy, in 2015, the designer has quickly become a poster boy for catwalk fashion that flouts gender norms, though he probably wouldn’t describe himself as such. Unisex fashion was retail’s answer to the increasingly loud debate over how we identify in terms of sexuality and gender – it was seen in Selfridges’ 2015 Agender unisex pop-up, and is now mainstream, with John Lewis recently making its childrenswear gender neutral. Jeffrey’s work is the flipside of this idea. Instead of discounting gender in fashion, taking away the gender constructs, it plays with them. He uses designs traditionally worn by a man (a suit, say) or a woman (a dress), and makes it a free-for-all, do-what-you-feel, dressing-up box.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeffrey’s Loverboy show at London fashion week men’s earlier this month. Composite: Rex Features

He is joined by other designers working in the same area, such as Edward Crutchley, who puts men in crinolines, and the Art School duo who put men on the catwalk in bodycon dresses. They all show their collections at the twice-yearly menswear showcase London fashion week men’s, which took place last weekend.

Jeffrey, though, is the star of this cohort. For his spring/summer 2018 show, the Loverboy label featured a man in a miniskirt and a woman in a striped trouser suit. It closed with a man in a floor-length wedding dress covered in childlike drawings. It didn’t – as it might have a few years ago, when streetwear dominated the men’s shows – prompt scepticism and sighs on the front row. Instead, it was rightly lauded as one of the best shows of the season and scored Jeffrey the emerging talent award at the Fashion awards in London in December. He collected the award from his hero, John Galliano, in a full face of makeup, including painted-on kiss curls.

Jeffrey followed his triumph with another this month. During the latest London fashion week men’s, he showed “Tantrum”, a blistering howl of a show that, in staging at least, recalled Alexander McQueen at his best. It began with a series of young men and women, painted white, running on to the catwalk and screaming at the front row. They then sat down at tables dotted in the venue and heckled models – including Faris Badwan from the Horrors – while swigging wine. Afterwards, Jeffrey told reporters that the collection was partly inspired by Alan Downs’ 2005 book The Velvet Rage, about growing up gay. “It’s about accepting anger and utilising it,” he said. “This is the first time I wanted to explore that particular emotion. It’s always been so joyous and fancy-free but there is a dark side to that, too, so I think it’s good to explore that.”

In 2015, a survey found that half of people aged 18-34 believe that gender exists on a spectrum and shouldn’t be limited to either male or female. Jeffrey is part of that generation refusing to define itself in binary terms. He believes “gender is like an idea” and “there’s this whole perception of how a man can look and a woman can look – and it’s such an interesting place to explore”. Jeffrey’s take on fashion and gender is playful and permissive – gender roles are something to be tried on, depending on how one feels that day. As such, it’s ignoring the signifiers of gender that clothing has provided for centuries. It’s disruptive. A man in a ballgown walking down a catwalk is like a Shakespearean heroine masquerading as a man – it’s carnivalesque, a cheeky “up yours” to the status quo. In fact, Jeffrey, in a truly millennial way, describes any discussion of gender as “a bit of an eye roll”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Backstage at the London fashion week men’s Edward Crutchley show. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA

He calls his career “a journey of my own identity”, one that began with Central Saint Martins’ infamously forthright tutor Louise Wilson, who died in 2014. “One day, she sat me down and I had all my drawings. I had a dress on, this big felt T-shirt and these weird shoes, and she was basically shouting at me: ‘Your work doesn’t make any sense!’” Wilson – who had also tutored Alexander McQueen and Christopher Kane – advised Jeffrey to examine his own dress sense and to take photographs of his outfits. These images, and this process, still form the basis of Loverboy, three years after he graduated.

This is a movement where the personal is the political – with Jeffrey’s kilt a perfect example. He tells a story of being on the metro in Paris. “I was wearing this Givenchy kilt skirt thing and these two guys started ripping the piss out of me … I ended up saying to them: ‘Vetements national … my heritage … I’m Scottish,’” he says. “They were like, ‘Oh, it’s a kilt. You’re not gay … it’s fine, then.’ I had to pretend not to be gay so I wouldn’t get harassed and I just remember thinking: ‘It’s so crazy,’ because as soon as they realised it was a kilt, their perception of it changed. Because [a kilt] is grounded in masculinity.”

Jeffrey has experimented with his image since his teens – and is well-versed in coping with other people’s reactions. He recalls getting punched at the age of 15 because he had dyed his hair orange. He worked out that he could survive – thrive, even – by finding a scene of like-minded people, first with an emo phase, and later in clubs in London. “What we do now feels like that for other people. One girl I met in Paris was dressed very normally,” he says. “She was shaking and she gave me this letter saying: ‘I have been able to come out because of your brand.’ I see her on Instagram now and she has shaved her head. She’s got that validation and she’s able to express herself.”

Finding a community where your identity is accepted and celebrated is an idea that would chime with Eden Loweth. He designs for his label, Art School, with his partner Tom Barratt who, says Loweth, “identifies as transgender, male to female”. For their show last Sunday, the two 24-year-olds included trans models and men in makeup on the catwalk. The trans model Munroe Bergdorf – who found herself in the limelight last year when she was hired by L’Oréal and then sacked for expressing strong opinions – sat in the front row wearing their clothes. Loweth says the brand is designed to appeal to their friends and those like them. “A lot of our friends wear mostly secondhand clothes because they can’t achieve their identity with clothes that are new and on the market now,” he says. “In the society we live in, it’s becoming increasingly hard for young people to have a voice. A lot of people channel that through what they wear; an expression of themselves.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Art School on the catwalk at London fashion week men’s. Composite: Rex Features

The place where this self-expression was honed – for Jeffrey anyway – wasn’t just the studios of Central Saint Martins, but the club scene of London. Loverboy shares its name with the night that Jeffrey set up in 2015, first to help finance him through college, but later to explore his ideas in a curated space. It ran for just a year, but provided – along with Jeffrey’s rent money – the fertile soil for his ideas to grow in. He describes clubs as “a safe space to think, feel, be, see and present yourself. It’s the ideal place to pull a look. You can pull a look when you go to a restaurant, but you’re not really enjoying that look as much.” Does he still go out a lot? Jeffrey tries to cover his smirk and then cracks. “Hmm … yes, I do. There’s a whole rave scene happening. My friend has a contact; they’ll send him a message when there’s a rave. It’s amazing.”

The writer and model Niall Underwood, who studied with Jeffrey, is a muse for the designer and regularly wears his designs. He calls Loverboy clothes for “a post-gender world” and says he enjoys wearing them because of how inclusive they are for those in his milieu: “I’m a cisgender man who dresses up in makeup, but some of our friends are more femme and they can wear Charles, too.” Underwood believes the club setting and community of creative people is vital. “We are all the odds and ends of different family backgrounds who ended up united in a London nightclub,” he says. “That’s not a new concept, but that doesn’t mean it’s invalid.”

As Underwood says, the club as a permissive place to explore self-expression and play with gender norms isn’t a new idea (nor is men wearing clothes designed for women – Jean Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood and JW Anderson have all played with this idea). Alistair O’Neill, reader in fashion history at Central Saint Martins, sees Jeffrey and his cohort in the tradition established in London since the late 60s. He namechecks David Hockney’s Notting Hill set, the scene around Roxy Music in the 70s and the clubs Blitz, Taboo and Kinky Gerlinky in the 80s – where Galliano, Westwood and Rachel Auburn, along with performance artist Leigh Bowery, were clientele. “Clubs can become the breeding ground for creativity,” says O’Neill. “Barry Miles called the dancefloor the R&D department of Central Saint Martins. These designs weren’t being sketched, they were being worn to a nightclub.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeffrey’s Loverboy show on the catwalk for London fashion week men’s SS18. Photograph: Stuart C Wilson/Getty Images

O’Neill is careful about connecting what Jeffrey and friends are doing to “LGBTQ visibility and new debates about gender identity”. Instead, he emphasises the playfulness of this group of designers – one that marks them out from the genderless trend that came before it. “This is quite different,” he says. “This is not about daywear, it’s about a new kind of evening wear. These are clothes that stand out.” He also credits social media with the normalising of outfits that used to be reserved for after dark. “It’s this giant mirror,” he says. “I think it has put a different spin on self-fashioning and self-appearance in relation to that kind of community of people who are interested in projecting an idea of themselves. It’s hugely powerful, though I don’t think it’s all positive.”

Jeffrey is part of a generation where non-heterosexual and cisgender identities have, as O’Neill says, been “normalised as part of their peer group and wider society”. If the folks attending Taboo had a very different life in the daytime – “they were doing it all at nights and waking up in squats”, says O’Neill – Jeffrey’s generation is increasingly using clothes as self-expression 24/7. The designer describes his class at Central Saint Martins as a place where “it was the norm for people to be wearing dresses, girls in suits. You would have your Supreme sportswear person next to someone who pins ties to a towel and wears that.” The success of RuPaul’s Drag Race – now on its ninth series – has, he says, helped the mainstream become acclimatised to this different way of dressing. “That drag look isn’t only something you see in a dark basement of a club, you see it’s something that can be digested.”

Even if his clothes are not designed to be a political statement, Jeffrey does feel strongly about providing a space where trans identity can be celebrated: “there is a lot of stigma still attached to trans people and it’s important to communicate with the whole spectrum of what gender is, people who want to be associated with femininity and masculinity”. Loweth also feels strongly about this issue, with the label’s recent show featuring several trans models. “Trans identity across the world is being attacked, especially with people such as Trump in power now,” he says. “We want to create joyous self-expressions to combat that.” Resistance through joy is an idea that feels very 2018.

There is a school of thought that more and more people will start to dress in a way that subverts the long-established structures of who is meant to wear what – whether in a big way, as with Jeffrey’s gang, or with smaller tweaks, such as young men wearing glitter at festivals. Does that mean there is a gap in the market? Selfridges, which has worked with Jeffrey and Art School, thinks so. Jack Cassidy, the company’s menswear buying manager, says the designer, whose show it hosted last weekend, “is leading the way for a less gender-specific way of dressing and categorisation”. In-store, following on from 2015’s Agender genderless fashion project, Cassidy adds that up to half of the designer men’s avant-garde department (where the likes of Jeffrey would sit) is now sold to women. Cassidy believes this across-gender shopping will continue: “Generally, the new generation of fashion-savvy consumer would shop in stores and departments that historically were targeted to the opposite gender.”

Perhaps what makes Jeffrey and this cohort of designers feel important is that they are experimenting with self-expression as much as selling clothes. It means what they are doing rings true – and for a zeitgeist where authenticity is highly prized, that’s the sweet spot. “I’m happy walking down the street with makeup. It might lift today, it might make it that much more interesting,” says Jeffrey. “Rather than: ‘I’m going for a night out,’ it’s like: ‘I’m going to go and get my eggs.’ Let’s see how that feels.”

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