  Understanding cladding properties is crucial for designing microstructured
optical fibers. This is particularly acute for Inhibited-Coupling guiding
fibers because of the reliance of their core guidance on the core and cladding
mode-field overlap integral. Consequently, careful planning of the fiber
cladding parameters allows obtaining fibers with optimized characteristics such
as low loss and broad transmission bandwidth. In this manuscript, we report on
how one can tailor the modal properties of hollow-core photonic crystal fibers
by adequately modifying the fiber cladding. We show that the alteration of the
position of the unity-tubes in the cladding of tubular fibers can alter the
loss hierarchy of the modes in these fibers, and exhibit salient polarization
propriety. In this context, we present two fibers with different cladding
structures which favor propagation of higher order core modes - namely LP11 and
LP21 modes. Additionally, we provide discussions on mode transformations in
these fibers and show that one can obtain uncommon intensity and polarization
profiles at the fiber output. This allows the fiber to act as a mode intensity
and polarization shaper. We envisage this novel concept can be useful for a
variety of applications such as hollow core fiber based atom optics,
atom-surface physics, sensing and nonlinear optics.
