Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spoken as a software professional and computer scientist. Human beings rely on signals to communicate efficiently, especially in larger groups. In the absence of well defined signals people will use what they have on hand and the results will be arbitrary at best and unhelpful in all likelihood due to propensity for misinterpretation and misrepresentation, especially since they may rely on inegalitarian mechanisms li…
Thanks for going into detail regarding your "wildly unpopular" opinion although I suspect it isn't quite so unpopular outside California. I can understand the value in certain circumstances of having a dress code or uniform, particularly with things like police, emergency, and military organisations. Soccer is also a good example. The goalkeepers have different uniforms and the captain wears an armband. So certainly…
It's incredibly complex and a lot of the evidence is circumstantial and layers of cultural cruft have certainly confused things but I'll say this --
People in the past didn't do things because they were stupid simpletons relegated to history books, they did a lot of things for real reasons and if we were born in those days we'd probably see the truth in spending a third of our income on clothing befitting our rank.
We ought to know by now the difference between an intractable argument and one we just can't understand yet, we seem to believe just because we can't understand something it can't be understood.
In my view people back then were very much worse off and struggling much more between the throes of life and death with sincere passion.
Having good clothes actually somehow conferred an advantage to the wearer that went way beyond societal perception or even shallow cultural biases to the core of their ability to live day to day.
You'd think we would've invented fast fashion earlier, but we've been wearing all sorts of costumes for millennia.
In the modern age our vehicles and electronic devices have taken over the cultural status symbolism perhaps but we've let our clothing sense lapse dreadfully into what I consider neo-renaissance pomp mixed with dark ages peasantry.
Anyway tl;dr - people in the past were struggling to survive yet still found some reason to invest a lot of their income in clothing.. Maybe there is something we've missed?