In menswear, streetwear is less a genre and more simply the norm. At this week’s spring 2019 shows, you could probably count on one hand the collections that didn’t feature trainers. But one person who doesn’t throw the term around with abandon is the designer Samuel Ross.

“Streetwear. Hmm. I’m not too keen on it as a word,” says Ross, 27, leaning back in his chair in his small, sweltering attic studio in east London. “But it is a powerful one.” I ask him to expand. “Well, it used to be used as a separator. Them and us. A class thing. But now luxury houses are adapting to it.” He pauses. “The people who are in that category are the ones dominating fashion.”

Models at the ACW show during London fashion week mens. Photograph: John Phillips/BFC/Getty Images

If Ross is not yet dominating fashion, he can almost taste it. Since launching his menswear label A-Cold-Wall* (ACW) in autumn 2015, aged 25, in three seasons he has become a rising star of British menswear with his cerebral, arty and futuristic take on, well, streetwear. A brace of recent nominations – the prestigious LVMH prize (he just lost out) and the Andam fashion award (still to come) – have sent his label global. His clothes are worn by the R&B star Kehlani, the actor Jaden Smith and the designer Virgil Abloh.

Ross is inspired by race, architecture and class – ACW is, among other things, about breaking down boundaries. In a single collection, you will see working-class uniforms alongside sportswear, Savile Row tailoring with building materials – jackets that resemble pebble-dash or the polythene sheets you might find on construction sites. At his spring 2019 show on Sunday, guests wore protective eyewear as metal structures were wheeled around by models. An industrial fan jarred to a minimal beat. At times, the clothes were in danger of sinking under the weight of concept. But then you meet Ross and realise there is more to it.

ACW designs. Photograph: Linda Nylind/the Guardian

Ross is black, working class and does not come from the standard Central St Martins fashion pool (he studied graphic design at De Montfort University in Leicester). He chooses his words in a nerdy, sometimes highfalutin way, but he is smart, snappy and fast talking. He explains how “protection”, “fear”, “tension”, and “pain” inform his work as much as being black. He describes clothes as objects or art, collections as performances, and becomes wide-eyed talking about nylon, shapes and lines. On his desk sits a Rubik’s cube, rulers and set squares.

Ross, who now has a partner and a baby daughter, was born in Brixton, but he barely remembers life there before his family moved to Northamptonshire, because it was easier to get a mortgage. He would shuttle between the two to see family until he was 12. Home was Wellingborough – a market town with a pond – which wasn’t as quaint as it sounds. “For one, it was way more segregated – there were a lot of race issues,” he says. “But at the same time it was quite diverse, even though it is known for being a white, working-class town.” The town voted overwhelmingly for Brexit. “Had I grown up in Brixton, I think we’d still be talking about the same stuff in my work.

A model at the ACW show. Photograph: WWD/Rex/Shutterstock

Ross’s grandparents came to Britain on the Empire Windrush – and both his grandmothers were nurses. “The scandal happened and that rattled me, yeah. I still grapple with the idea of being English but I felt more [English] before the scandal,” he says. “I have a hard time grappling with the last 10 generations, to be honest.” Ross recently did a DNA test and discovered his family had originally come from Benin, in west Africa. “There is always going to be displacement,” he says of the scandal, before paraphrasing James Baldwin: “There is no way you can be a conscious black person and not have angst every day.”

His father studied art at Central St Martins, which was “groundbreaking” in the 80s, and worked in stained glass windows. His mother is a lecturer at the University of Northampton. “Education has always been the thing in our family, and art,” he says. Ross was encouraged to draw on the floorboards, but took a circuitous route into fashion. “Nike tracksuits were my uniform. And buying fake shoes for £20, or selling fake Adidas from my house to turn a profit, was normal.” He laughs. “I mean, clearly, there was some sort of interest in fashion, a link.”

Funnily enough, it is the architecture that has stayed with him. Not his terraced home, but the brutalist buildings or hostels, where a lot of his friends lived – post-war Victorian houses that had been gutted and fitted with cheap carpets. “There were drug issues, some had violent homes, but I was 15. I didn’t really look at things in a deeper level. These were and are my friends.”

The ACW show. Photograph: John Phillips/BFC/Getty Images

After studying design, he went to work in “hardcore commercial design”. He lasted a year. “I felt like I had been tricked. That everything I had read at uni was a lie to get me into the system.” He started putting his designs online to get noticed before he came across Off-White, the label overseen by Virgil Abloh, who has just taken over as head of menswear at Louis Vuitton in one of the biggest moves in menswear. He emailed Abloh. Abloh responded and he went to work for him, as well as Kanye West’s Yeezy label.

These days, being a designer does not always mean simply that. At the CFDA awards last week, James Jebbia (the man behind Supreme) won menswear designer of the year despite not being a designer. Like Abloh, Ross came to fashion sideways, through design. “I’ve only consciously worked in fashion, as we know it, for five years.”

That is as far you will get on the topic of Abloh or West. He mentions their names in passing, but he is guarded. “Look. [Abloh] is my big bro. We speak weekly,” Ross says of the most prominent black designer in the industry. He adds: “I mean, now I know that Ozwald [Boateng] was at Givenchy, but it wasn’t widely talked about. If I had known that 10 years ago, it would have steered me down this direction sooner.”

ACW’s show at London fashion week. Photograph: John Phillips/BFC/Getty Images

Abloh attended Ross’s show at east London’s Truman Brewery on Sunday morning. The collection was part show, part performance art. Padded armless jackets, loose trousers – zipped or cut open – and plastic transparent coats sat alongside his signature detachable hoods. At one point, a styrofoam box was wheeled out and broken apart and a naked man covered in water and “blood” emerged. When it looked like Abloh got his Nikes wet, the audience gasped. Backstage, though, the designer was unfazed. “It’s so good to see him grow,” he said. “We’re a tribe and we have to stick together.”

To anyone following Ross’s career, the collection was clearly a step up. Tomorrow London Holdings recently acquired a “substantial minority stake”, meaning the clothes are now produced in Vicenza, Italy, instead of Leytonstone, east London. It shows. “I’m producing with people who worked at Margiela,” he says. “Up until now I’ve been capping my ideas due to the resources. Now the cap is off.” He has a team of 14, including his close friend and ACW’s brand partner Andrew Harper, and two more who fly between Italy and London.

A model at the ACW show during London fashion week mens. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/PA

It’s not cheap. A T-shirt will set you back almost £200; socks, £45. To counter criticism, he has an affordable line called Polythene, where T-shirts cost £40. “We hired two transit vans to go round London for the new collection and sold T-shirts out of the back,” he says.

It makes sense that his work overlaps with his various cultural identities – his Benin roots, his Northamptonshire childhood, his time spent in London. “I came from a working-class background, but I’m not in that world anymore,” he says. “If fashion has long been about the upper-class painting the working class, this is post-class.”

As to what happens next, surely a big fashion house is on the cards? “With time,” he says. “I’m 27. I’m not in a rush”.