At the beginning of the 2004 coming-of-age classic Mean Girls, the earnest protagonist Cady Heron gets led through the school cafeteria by recently made acquaintances Damian and Janis. Through the scene, the pair points out the varying cliques of the high school ecosystem. You have the cool Asians, the burnouts, the plastics, the band geeks. It’s a scene trotted out in every high school film and indeed in a lot of ways, you could say the same for every fashion week too.

You have the streetwear crew making sure everyone sees them rolling up to the show, the stylish mid-century purveyors getting snapped by Garcon Jon outside, the Carhartt WIP dwelling workwear squad shuffling around at the back.

Essentially though the moral of Mean Girls is that the way to survive is through avoiding being shoehorned into any of these factions. Instead it’s much more profitable to just take what you need from each and spin it into your own style. And so from this, we take you through each of the men’s style tribes in the fashion cafeteria, as told by the one friend from each that you want to take and make your own.

Streetwear

The Bomber Jacket

Streetwear is a bit of a style mongrel. A sprawling, poorly defined movement that pinches from other styles, it’s taken pieces from skatewear and hip-hop down to mid-century style and the military.

The bomber jacket is perhaps the thing that unites it all. It started life as a flight jacket worn by World War I pilots and has undergone various remodels, although the MA-1 model created exclusively for the US military by Alpha Industries is often regarded the quintessential bomber. It swapped the earlier fur collar for an elastic one that allowed more room for a parachute harness and bags of lasting cool.

From then, the bomber jacket became more and more popular on civvy street, with two breaking points – its adoption by high fashion in the late eighties and early nineties thanks to Jean-Paul Gauthier and Raf Simons, and the ‘Kanye’ effect at the beginning of this decade when the rapper wore a customised MA-1 on his Yeezus tour.