The poster boy for one of the dominant trends in menswear right now is a 70-year-old northerner wearing loose dungarees and a big smile. British fashion designer Nigel Cabourn made his name creating clothes based on vintage workwear and military pieces that are as tough as the people who wore them first time around.

He’s been doing it for decades but now, many other labels are following his lead. As casual dress codes dominate men’s style, durable, functional workwear is the toast of menswear.

Case in point: rock and roll star Liam Gallagher has just played the biggest US talk show, The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, while rocking a brand new parka from Nigel Cabourn’s collaboration with skateboard brand Element (most of Liam’s famous parkas are Cabourn). The designer is buzzing.

He’s also nursing an ever-so-slight headache from the packed-out launch of that collection at his Covent Garden store the night before we meet. For a man who has just entered his eighth decade, you can’t say he isn’t slaying the hype machine at the moment.

Miraculous clean-up done-and-dusted, we sidle into the store the morning after to be greeted by a cheery Cabourn trying out a pair of thick corduroy trousers pulled up by some contrasting braces. “What do you think, lads?” his northern brogue punching through the store speakers. “Looking good, hey? Can you get us a pic in them for the Insta?”

Cabourn started his label making outerwear in the 1970s where his rise coincided with that of fellow Brits Margaret Howell and Sir Paul Smith (who got him his first break in London when they met in 1972). After struggling through a mid-career lull in the ’90s, Cabourn re-ignited in the 21st century, a resurgence built on the three tenets of building hype in the fashion game – big-name collaborations (Timex, Converse, Fred Perry, Peak Performance), a profile in the Far East (“the bulk of my business is in Japan”) and a killer Instagram feed.