When it comes to global streetwear trends, all roads lead to one in Los Angeles.

For more than a century, Los Angeles has been the world capital of visual storytelling, unspooling new mythologies one panel at a time, 24 frames per second. Even within the city sprawl, the stories that Angelenos tell themselves, about themselves and about the world at large, come through images: on billboards, in murals, tags, graphic tees. In this city where self-mythology is a boom industry, exteriorisation is everything. Here, signalling is our native language, where the Bentleys are borrowed and the Lambos are on lease, branding, flexing, flash, are the local patois.

To find out what that looks and sounds like now, MR PORTER went right to the source, to the very centre of the Hypebeast-y heart of the city, to Fairfax Avenue, to see what the locals are wearing – and what the local brands are making. This corridor, formerly the centre of graffiti art in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and before that a late-night hangout for musicians, is the natural nexus for the main threads of American menswear these days, weaving together the best bits of rock’n’roll grunge, boxy skater silhouettes, an “eternal summer” surf vibe, and the sneaker culture that vaulted it all into the world of high fashion.