If Andy Palfreyman were a practical man, he never would have agreed to have coffee with me. It’s less than 10 days out from Fashion Week, after all, and he’ll be putting on a full runway show with the usual hoi polloi in attendance. But Andy has never been a practical man, and so here we are, tucked into a hidden corner of Soho, ingesting our caffeine and discussing Vivienne Westwood.

Andy’s looking offensively fresh for someone who’s just moved house. His trademark bon vivant aesthetic is on full display: houndstooth blazer, crimson Doc Martens, and a Cheshire Cat grin.

He whips out his phone as he plops down and immediately begins showing me photos of his new apartment. It’s been photographed from every angle —he is a photographer after all—but Andy has another reason for the diligent documentation: it's his first home in 36 years. He’s been sleeping rough around the corner in Covent Garden for most of his life.

In the last year Andy has become the inadvertent face of homelessness, after his exhibition of photographs of life on the streets garnered him national attention. It all began when he wandered into Covent Garden’s Swiss Church and became friends with the staff. One of its congregants gifted him a camera, and the results were so arresting that he had his first exhibit in the nave shortly after. “It’s very surreal...it’s just mind blowing, it really is... I didn’t realize I was creative because I couldn’t be creative because all your energy was taken up getting through the day. Until now, I’ve got so many ideas and things I wanna do.”

Those things include the exhibition and, of course, planning the fashion show, which will feature models in various states of dishabille to showcase the difficulty of dressing while homeless. “The better you’re dressed the better you feel, it’s a proven fact, if you dress well you feel better. If we can get homeless guys some nice clothes to wear, they’ll feel a bit better. It always worked for me,” Andy says, adjusting his tortoise-shell glasses.

I suggest that it’s a lot of stress for anyone, and Andy confesses that he doesn’t sleep well at night in his new apartment, owned by a friend from the Swiss Church. “I’m probably getting three or four hours a night, but that’s actually improved because that’s unbroken. Normally when you're on the streets everything wakes you up.” He finds comfort in reading, he tells me, ordering a second cup of tea.

His favourite book is A Sense of Freedom by long term prisoner Jimmy Boyle. “I can relate to it, I was in solitary confinement for 30 years, or that’s how it felt. And now I’m the best person I know, I love being me, it’s a feeling I never thought I’d get back, never ever.” I tell him that I envy him. “Don’t think that’s ever been said about me before,” he chuckles.

Andy continues scrolling through his photos, and pauses to show me his recent reunion with his high school sweetheart, dressed just as suavely as he is.

“In my high school yearbook I was voted “most likely to succeed,” he muses. “Only took me 30 years, but I have.”