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Simons grew up in Neerpelt, Belgium. He was an only child. His father joined the army at the age of 17; his mother worked as a cleaner. Neerpelt has a population of 16,000 now, and back then the only access to popular culture in this rural area came from the local record shop, where Simons bought Kraftwerk and Joy Division records as a teenager. Music has always been important to him and he's referenced Richey Edwards from the Manic Street Preachers, Joy Division's Ian Curtis and Peter Saville's Factory Records artwork in various Raf Simons collections. He did well at school but resisted his teachers' efforts to guide him in the sensible direction of law or medicine, and instead headed off to study industrial design at college in nearby Genk, a city dominated by car manufacture. He started his professional life as a furniture designer but became fascinated by fashion when the Belgian designers known as the Antwerp Six - internationally, the best known are Dries van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester and Walter Van Beirendonck - became famous in the Eighties. He says he wasn't interested in fashion before then, he was interested in 'dress code', which seems a very Raf-ian distinction. With the help of Linda Loppa (then director of the Antwerp Fashion Academy) he worked as an intern with Van Beirendonck and finally launched his first collection in 1995.

Despite his love of the future, Simons will never forget his past. Not least because inspiration for his Raf Simons label is inextricably linked to the lives of young Belgians, men embroiled in youth culture and life in the country where he grew up. Since the beginning, Simons has cast models for his fashion shows from Antwerp's streets. Some have walked for him for 10 years or more.

'We have a social, psychological dialogue with them,' Simons explains. 'From the beginning we wanted to work with young people and grow up with them, but always catch up with new generations. I think the young are very open to dialogue with older people, but it's not the same the other way around. But you know, the office is not a social institution - we don't have time to talk every day, but the guys come for fittings and shoots. Antwerp's a small place, so you run into each other. I felt very much helped by an older generation when I was young. The person who made me believe in what I do now was Linda Loppa. I thought I had seen a lot with New Wave and art and going out. Then suddenly I was standing in her house and I found a mentality that was so open and revolutionary. One generation can make the other dream about the future and believe it. I don't want to be perceived by young people as this old bastard complaining about them.'
It actually sounds as if he would have reason to complain about them. Part of creating a Raf Simons collection is asking these models what they think of the clothes. 'Sometimes they say: "I think it looks like ****." These kids from Antwerp, they don't care. If one in 40 say it's ****, you think: he had no taste. If 20 say it, you think: maybe this isn't what this generation is interested in.'

It's this analysis of youth culture and the relationship with and interest in young people which led to comparisons with Hedi Slimane, who developed a similar relationship with his models in Paris when he started at Dior Homme in 2000. But Simons doesn't want to aggravate the situation with Slimane by talking about it. Though he does laugh at the thought of being the best menswear designer - 'Well, that wouldn't be bad for me!' - he wants to move on from any sense of rivalry. 'It's just about me now, dealing with a new grown-up product.'

The spring/summer 2008 Raf Simons collection is, in fact, grown up. It suggests an alternative to the younger generation's main preoccupation: computers. Simons says he worries about how much time kids spend online and what this does to their experience.

'Computers let people avoid people, going out to explore. It's so different to just open a website instead of looking at a Picasso in a museum in Paris. Exploring countries, people, even sexuality - it loses an aspect of nature which I think is important... God, I sound like a teacher, don't I? But the young kids that we cast used to talk about where they'd been, what they'd done. Lately, they've got a lot of information, but it's all from a computer. They're skipping so much. They skip school. When I was young, I knew I wanted to do something creative and run, run, run from this Catholic, mathematics, Latin, Greek education. I was trying to find out everything about art. I realise now that though I didn't like school, it was a good reality. These kids don't feel what an important part of reality that is.'

Simons doesn't just think about the heavy things, though. He enjoys talking about pop culture, professing a current preference for 'technological' music over bands because 'you don't get the performance and the cool kids - it's construction and sound, and I find that more fascinating'. He loves movies. Of course he liked the Joy Division biopic Control - 'the band has always been a big obsession' - but his favourite last year was the serial-killer film Zodiac, which he thought was 'standout because I didn't expect it be like that at all, not having a defined ending, I liked that'. He smiles: 'It's funny you ask these questions, I always ask my assistants - "What's your favourite vegetable, what's your favourite fruit juice?" - because I think about this all the time.'

We have a positively gossipy conversation about fashion designers and magazines; he expresses admiration for one designer's recent weight loss. 'He's done amazingly well,' Simons says. 'When you get to 40, you think about these things.' And he pats his nonexistent belly ruefully. We wait outside for taxis so that he can smoke. He has to head back to the Jil Sander workshops and reinvent fashion. I have to catch a plane. When my car draws up, he kisses me warmly on each cheek. 'Have a very merry Christmas,' he says. 'And a happy New Year.' And he smiles and waves, looking genuinely excited at the thought of the festivities to come. The future, after all, in Raf's world is the stuff of romance and dreams.

The Observer