FFS – For Fashion’s Sake – is a new column that picks the threads of directional, divisive menswear. From the omnihype of luxury streetwear to the foibles of designers’ trippiest fever dreams, these are the bleeding-edge trends to cop or scoff at right now

In times of geopolitical or economic uncertainty, people start to dress for the occasion. Whenever the world is teetering on the edge of Cold War 2, you can be pretty certain there will be camo prints at fashion week. If there’s going to be tanks rolling down New Bond Street, then you might as well look the part.

The warcore trend is fashion’s angst-ridden response to rolling headlines about yellow vest protests, alt right violence and war games in the South China Sea. Like a special ops unit of streetwear, this menswear division sees recruits dressed head-to-toe in combat threads, and we’re not talking about long-welcomed military pieces like a bomber jacket. For SS19, it’s all about mid-layers that look like bomb vests. Balaclavas on the runway. Accessories that could just as easily carry spare rounds of ammunition as your keys and wallet.

The correlation between conflict and fashion isn’t always exact (we didn’t all start dressing in faux-body armour as soon as the Harriers took off for Baghdad in 2003), but the influence of a society on the verge of violence often manifests in street style and catwalk fashion.

The most famous (and of course, the most over-used) example of this relationship between style and discontent is the advent of punk – when a nation gripped by recession, politicised street violence, a three day week and a gravedigger’s strike came up with a tattered, bomb-site aesthetic that would go on to become one of the great touchstones for visual culture the world over.

Some years later, long-standing army surplus store Laurence Corner became an unlikely mecca for trendy young Londoners looking for striking, but durable clobber to navigate a fractured city in. Leather coats, ribbed knit jumpers, combat fatigues, MA1 jackets and carefully placed rips and tears have hardly spent a season out of vogue since.