In his book Eminently Suitable, G Bruce Boyer devotes a chapter to the question of how to dress for one’s figure. He opens by puncturing one of fashion’s more enduring illusions – that some men are naturally built better for clothes, as though style were something you can genetically inherit, like skin or hair colour.

“You hear it all the time,” Boyer wrote. “The idea that some men simply look better because their bodies wear clothes better… Even some men who work at keeping in shape, who exercise and watch their diet, have this fatalistic attitude. The truth is that anyone can look ridiculous; some men choose not to. Those who choose not to have learnt that many of the opinions about dress are lumbered with myth, misinformation and misguided prescriptions. Such men have learnt, in short, to dress themselves without relying on public opinion.”

I didn’t realise how badly public opinion had curdled until a few years ago, when my Twitter account started to gain traction, and I encountered – over and over again – the notion that style is little more than a person’s physique made visible. According to some, a lean or athletic body can make anything look good, while those not blessed with certain proportions are left to the misfortune of looking wrong in everything.

This was news to me, as someone who has spent more than 15 years on a menswear forum, where men of all body types and budgets learnt to dress phenomenally. Plus, there’s no shortage of lean, athletic men who dress badly (just look outside). I propose a better way of thinking about how to dress for your body type.

Fashion and its related industries – including Hollywood and social media – have a well-documented habit of shrinking aesthetics down to a narrow band of acceptable forms. If your sense of style is limited to consuming their images, it’s easy to conclude that you need a certain body to look stylish. You either have that lean, athletic build or you work towards it. Failing that, you use clothes to cover up your shortcomings.

However, the fashion industry is neither the sole source nor the ultimate authority on style. Instead, fashion is just a small part of a larger cultural system. Style emerges from that wider cultural context, shaped by history and personal experience.

The idea that style is anchored in culture rather than fashion is hardly new. It has been circulating, in one form or another, since the early modern period. As early as the 18th century, the Anglo-Dutch thinker Bernard Mandeville observed that those considered “fashionable” were often doing little more than aligning themselves with the manners of the upper ranks.

A similar idea appears in George Simmel’s 1902 essay “On Fashion”, where he described fashion as a loop of imitation and escape, in which subordinates copy their supposed “social betters”, causing those “betters” to move on. Decades later, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it more bluntly in his book Distinction, where he posited that our notions of “good taste” are often just the habits and preferences of the ruling class. But not for long.

In the early 20th century, Edward VIII – later known as the Duke of Windsor – was the preeminent arbiter of menswear. He popularised dress belts, cuffed trousers, soft collars, country attire and a distinct form of English tailoring known as the “drape cut”. For a time, his dress became the template of “good style”, copied by those eager to align themselves with his social position. But over the course of the century, a cascade of social and political upheavals reorganised the centres of cultural authority.

The labour movement, civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, anti-war protests and growing democratic sentiments meant that people no longer looked to the ruling class for dress direction. Instead, people increasingly drew inspiration from musicians, artists, cowboys, countercultural types and everyday working-class people. By the close of the century, the world of men’s style was much more diverse, having been shaped by various subcultures from the ground up, rather than being dictated by elites from above.

This change becomes even clearer once you trace the supply chain of ideas in the fashion industry. Hiroki Nakamura of visvim draws heavily from hippies, rebels and folk heroes. Ralph Lauren’s RRL is built around the imagery of early 20th-century labourers, including factory workers and farmhands. Even Rick Owens, the dark prince of avant-garde, has cited underground club scenes as a source of inspiration.

Once you see culture as the true wellspring of style, the hierarchy of body types looks flimsy. It would come as a surprise to mid-century biker gangs to learn that burly men can’t wear heavy leather jackets. Or to older Neapolitan tailors of shorter stature that one must be built like Adonis to wear a soft-shouldered sport coat. The first step to understanding how to dress for your body type is to break free of the fashion industry and look towards the broader world of culture for inspiration.

The internet teems with a veritable cottage industry of corrective dressing, offering guides on how to dress for every shape imaginable. Large men, we’re told, shouldn’t wear horizontal stripes because they make you look wider. Short men shouldn’t wear cuffed trousers because they truncate the leg line. These rules are dressed up as practical advice, but they rest on shaky logic and accept the fashion industry’s standards as law.

Follow these too closely and you’ll enter a state of perpetual self-surveillance, forever asking whether a garment diminishes or exaggerates some defect that you see in yourself. The result is self-consciousness and anxiety, pushing you toward clothes that conceal rather than express, ultimately producing the opposite of style.

Instead of leading with body type, start with the cultural language of dress. We no longer live in a world where a single class sets the terms for how men should appear. This has made the task of dressing more complicated, but also more pleasurable.

There are a million sources now for cultural inspiration, both historical and contemporary. Are you inspired by the rugged attire of 1930s French labourers? The rumpled look of 1960s intellectuals? Or the way members of The Stonemasters, a motley group of 1970s California rock climbers, wore block-coloured sportswear and pullover fleeces in what would become the progenitor of Gorpcore? Each is its own system, with distinct ideas on how to treat fit, proportion and styling. Dressing well is knowing how to communicate within a certain aesthetic language.

For instance, classic men’s tailoring operates as a kind of wearable classicism, its template borrowed from traditional Western ideas about the Platonic male form. We see this figure in Michelangelo’s “David”, a man with shoulders broader than his hips, creating a V-shaped torso set on a pair of columnar legs. Your average bespoke tailor will seek to recreate this silhouette using face fabric, haircloth, canvas and padding, which are shaped through pad stitching, darts and ironwork.

If you’re a broad man with a minimal drop – tailor-speak for the difference between your chest and waist size – a tailor will extend the shoulder line to make the waist look smaller by comparison. Conversely, if you have an athletic build, the tailor might reduce the amount of padding and fullness in the chest to avoid exaggerating this effect.

However, this is not the only legitimate silhouette. Mid-century American flight jackets, such as the MA-1 and CWU-45P bomber jacket, were historically cut short and rounded, so they would be warm and insulating without getting in the way of a seated pilot. By the late 20th century, punks adopted them as part of their countercultural uniform, a shift that later allowed designers such as Raf Simons to reinterpret these jackets as a symbol of youthful rebellion. A svelte man inspired by these aesthetics will want a fuller, rounded bomber jacket, even if it feels oversized at first. In this way, clothing serves as a kind of morphology, allowing your body to take on different shapes to communicate ideas, rather than “correcting” for physical “defects”.

Sometimes, seeing a great outfit can inspire you to wonder whether the same ensemble would look as stylish and convincing on you. In such cases, it can be useful to identify what exactly caught your eye. Is it the combination of colours or textures? How they teamed a denim shirt with a navy double-breasted suit to create an element of surprise? Or is it the overall shape, such as the elongating line of an overcoat?

If it’s the silhouette, consider how to adapt those proportions to your own build. Of course, some looks are easier to pull off than others. In 2013, Karl Lagerfeld admitted that he lost nearly 100 pounds through a low-calorie diet, just so he could wear Hedi Slimane’s creations, underscoring how some clothes demand a certain kind of figure. Thankfully, most silhouettes are not so demanding and can be translated.

For instance, a pair of high-rise, fuller-legged trousers will create a lengthening line on a tall, thin figure. A shorter figure can still wear high-rise trousers, but the leg may need to be slimmed up a bit to retain the same silhouette. One way to think about this is to imagine a rectangle. If you shorten it from the bottom, it becomes a square, which can look a bit stout. But if you shorten it while also trimming the sides, the original proportions remain intact.

Reframed this way, “dressing for your body” stops being a corrective exercise and becomes a semiotic one. The aim is not to repair a flawed physical form, but to render it legible within a chosen aesthetic system.

A few years ago, I interviewed Ethan Newton, cofounder of menswear store Bryceland’s in Japan, about how to dress for a larger figure. “Embrace who you are and dress for the body you have,” he encouraged, “instead of the body that society or some fashion designer thinks you should have.” This is the first step towards building a better and more fulfilling wardrobe.