[barry-cotter]

This will vary enormously by field, and countersignaling is a thing. All bankers wear suits. If you see someone wearing a scruffy ill fitting suit maybe they’re just incapable of buying a well fitting suit and keeping it in good nick or maybe they are awesome and know they’re awesome and know everybody else knows it so they can get away with it. You saw the same thing at IBM when they started going casual. If everyone else is wearing a suit, is normal, and there’s one person with blue hair and full sleeve tattoos they’re getting special dispensation because they’re awesome. But the blue hair didn’t make them awesome.

[andreilys]

Correct. Counter signaling is typically done by extremely competent people which balances out their eccentricity

[sukilot]

Or by people imitating the appearance of extremely competent people.

[spanhandler]

I'm pretty sure the transition of "tech fashion" from something early computer nerds did at least somewhat authentically to its modern form was, at first, an example of exactly that (by people who "don't care about their appearance", naturally, wink wink). Of course these days there's a bunch of other stuff it's mixed with, like hipster fashion and outdoor-lifestyle-but-only-the-expensive-stuff clothing, but originally it seems to me to have grown out of exactly that aping-authentic-countersignaling thing.