A functional tool can still look nice, but the function is still more important than the looks, otherwise it's just useless bling (the fashion industry is the perfect example though, they need to sell new stuff each year without actually changing anything important, all they can really do is change pointless details).

A functional tool can look nice, but a tool designed with a “function only” mentality is very unlikely to look nice.

Good design is a balance of many factors.

Poor analogy. A better one for clothing would be to remove the button and zipper from pants for a cleaner look.

Elastic does work much better, also suspenders are 10x better than belts

So modern UI design is spandex?

It's removing all buttoned and zippered pants from your store one year and replacing them with spandex one year, then coming back in 5 years and removing all spandex in favor of buttons and zippers.

i generally decide my own clothing. and... if I choose UI X... I would like to keep using it. At some point, I have to adopt someone else's ideas of 'good UI' in order to keep using a computer for 'every day' stuff. At some point, my online banking forces an upgrade, and that means 'new UI', whether I like it or not. I can keep wearing 70s flares and still go in and use a local bank if I chose to.