Is your prejudice showing here?
Society as a whole runs by virtue of "protocols" that have evolved over many hundreds of years. Those protocols have themselves evolved as indeed they should to reflect current expectations about our behavior. As individuals we either choose to acknowledge the expectations set by society's protocols or we don't. But if we choose to live entirely by our own protocols don't be upset or disappointed when things don't work out. I spent over 40 years as a "professional" in both engineering and IT. I didn't particularly like having to wear a shirt and tie and now that I am retired I can choose. What I can tell you is that at no time, despite rising to quite senior positions, is that my attire had absolutely nothing to do with my feelings about personal status or importance. You will always find a few people who look at life that way but the vast majority of the people that I encountered aimed to treat everybody as equals as long as they didn't apparently go out of their way to be "delibarately different". Why? Because their selfish behavior affected everybody. By being deliberately different they were really no different from and no better than those they apparently despised for their "conformity".
