Henry Holland thinks that, on reflection, he did not inherit his style from his father. "He told me the other day he'd be wearing his new jacket to my sister's 30th birthday party. I said, 'Which one?' He said, 'The pink one."'

Holland leans across the table with the air of someone sharing an embarrassing secret. "It's not actually pink," he says, dropping his voice to a whisper. "It's more a deep red. And I said, 'Is it new?' My dad said, 'Well, I've only had it four years."'

Holland shakes his head with affectionate exasperation. "He's a solicitor," he says, as if that explains everything.

Holland junior would never be mistaken for anything so prosaic. At 26, he is one of the most sought-after young designers in Britain and is styled accordingly. Today, he is sporting his trademark vertical quiff, a feat of follicular engineering that one imagines can only be achieved with a remarkable amounts of patience and hairspray. His grey T-shirt is artfully splattered with fluorescent paint and his black Prada shoes are patterned with eye-catching silver studs. His slender fingers are weighed down with chunky gothic rings. The effect is exotic cockatiel meets Sex Pistols. Bizarrely, it works.

Three years ago, Holland, then making his living as a fashion editor for teen magazines, started designing rhyming slogan T-shirts for his friends (sample: "I'll Tell You Who's Boss Kate Moss") that rapidly became a fashion crowd in-joke. In 2006, designer Gareth Pugh appeared at the end of his London Fashion Week catwalk show wearing a T-shirt tribute to fellow designer Giles Deacon ("Get Yer Freak On Giles Deacon").

Soon, everyone who was anyone wanted a Henry Holland T-shirt.

"Yeah, I started my entire business as a joke, which sounds bad, doesn't it?" He grins. "It's been a transition. I was a writer, I wrote on clothes and then I made clothes." He says the couplets came naturally. "I own a rhyming dictionary, which helps."

The shirts became so popular that he diversified and founded his own label, House of Holland, now stocked in Harrods, Barneys in New York and worn by celebrities including Lindsay Lohan, Jaime Winstone, the singer M.I.A. and Holland's best friend, supermodel Agyness Deyn. He has known Deyn since childhood - she served fish and chips at a shop near Holland's home village of Ramsbottom in Lancashire, in the north west of England. "She had braces and mousy brown hair and we hung out in town with mutual friends."

Later, Deyn was spotted by a model scout while the two of them were shopping in London and was soon being photographed by Mario Testino for the cover of Vogue. Do they ever sit back and marvel at the fact that two kids from Ramsbottom are now riding the crest of a fashion wave? "We'd be complete wankers if we did that, wouldn't we? Pause the TV! 'Hang on, you're the hottest model and I'm one of the hottest young designers, let's talk about that while I make a brew."'

He delivers this scenario with the timing of a stand-up comic. "It is nice to have someone else in the industry," he concedes. "She can call up and say, 'I just shot with Steven Meisel' and I know what it means, whereas if I called my dad and said, 'I'm doing this', he'd be [puts on strident Lancashire accent], 'Do they pay your travel?"'