As much as he dutifully accepted the responsibilities that come with the most high-profile job in fashion, with his own line he has grown increasingly introspective. For the past two years, his collections have been intensely personal: One was literally pasted with images of Simons’s past, patchworked together, juxtaposing a passport image of the designer as a teenager, a photograph of his parents, a Japanese woodcut. (Simons is a cult figure in Japan, where he has two stores.) A later collection, containing long white coats scribbled with graffiti, was inspired by similar garments sported during hazing rituals enacted at colleges in Belgium, like the one Simons attended in the late ’80s. Simons has also forgone the standard runway show. He’s made his audience stand as his models walk by. For his recent fall show, he constructed a twisting maze of wooden flats, press and buyers clustering around them as the models strode past urgently. Simons told me the show was about Martin Margiela, about his memories and connection to the designer that triggered his entry into fashion. Like Margiela, Simons is trying to make us feel something: surprise, shock, maybe even sadness. It isn’t autobiographical. He isn’t telling us what happened at any point in his life, but articulating how he felt, and trying to make us feel the same.

I ask if his seminal Sterling Ruby show prompted a plunge into the personal. ‘‘I think it’s more connected to the fact that I was doing this other thing,’’ Simons says. He means Dior. ‘‘Something you’re never really aware of — or maybe something you’ve always been very aware of — but you never really think it over: ­the fact that it is your thing. It is what I started, what I’m about.’’ If his Dior clothes were marked by a reverence for the ‘‘codes’’ of the brand — the femme fleur, the Bar jacket — the past two years have seen Simons marking out his own label’s identity, his own design tropes and hallmarks. ‘‘When you start performing as the creative director of another brand, you realize how much it’s not . . . that. How different those two are. You could really work your ass off, really bring a lot of your own thing, but it’s not the same thing. . . . I didn’t really think it over but with my own brand, I have became very protective, almost. Doing literally what I want to do, that relates to its own history or my own history or my own being or . . . I don’t know.’’ Simons’s thick eyebrows knit together. ‘‘I never really thought of it until now.’’ I remember something he said to me, for a profile I was writing in the Independent magazine more than a year before he left Dior: ‘‘My opinion is that being a creative director in a huge institution is . . . you enter, and you’re going to go out. I could never take the attitude that this thing stands or falls with me. No. My brand, yes, but Dior or Jil, no. . . . I don’t experience it as something that I have to make mine. It’s not mine.’’

Simons’s own line, however, is definitely, defiantly his and his alone. It not only reflects his specific interests, his personal fixations, but the moment in which each design is devised. The former is fairly standard. If a designer is obsessed with 18th-century art or the designs of Ettore Sottsass for Memphis (as so many seem to be), you’re guaranteed to find references on their runway. But the latter isn’t a given. Simons’s clothing has a cultural resonance that few fashion designers, for men’s wear or women’s wear, have ever enjoyed.

In 2001, he created two collections whose models’ wrapped faces, layering, air of distress and rebellion reflected global upheaval: school shootings, guerrilla warfare, anticapitalist protests, the violence around the then-recent G8 summit in Genoa. They predated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but were eerily prescient. Those are the kind of things you’re not supposed to talk about in fashion. But at their best, designers capture the mood of a time, making clothes that are a testament to the moment in which they were created. Dior did that, in 1947, when his New Look captured the fantasies and tensions of a postwar fashion industry looking to make women dream ­and return to the home. Simons does it too. His clothes speak of the disenfranchised masses, of youthful disquiet, of the turmoil of the outer world. It’s why he admits to being drawn to art even more than to fashion. He handles the heavy stuff.

Many have interpreted Simons’s clothes as garments of aggression; of rebellion and revolt. He talks of them as protection. ‘‘I think maybe it’s when you feel fragile, when you have a lot of questions,’’ he says. Simons stopped designing for 12 months before those two shows: He investigated other projects, edited an issue of the British style publication i-D and assessed if he wanted to be in fashion anymore. ‘‘I had a love-hate relationship with fashion,’’ he carefully says. ‘‘In a way I was completely obsessed and attracted and I loved it; on the other, I hated it. Hated it.’’