I always wear a collared shirt to work because I like them and they do look neat, but I cannot stand people that demand it from others.

Hygiene is pretty important in the business I work since some of our devices come in contact with drinking water. But I can assure you that hygiene often does not correlate with outside appearances.

Still, we have rules for people that have customer contact because people are still judgemental, even if they are often demonstrably wrong.

To underscore, I would bet that washing hands frequently, wearing gloves when touching food and masks/hood when working near food is much more important than the difference between wearing a fresh white-collar shirt vs a sweat shirt you change every other day.

That is vastly more important. It is mandatory to wash your hands before visiting production as well as changing clothes. Regardless of how clean they look, they will contain foreign matter. The cafeteria is pretty much declared a hazard zone, not only because of that one colleague who has a weird cheese experiment going on in the fridge.

Downside for management is that we are only allowed to drink water in our offices and are not allowed to eat outside the cafeteria. With time I have grown to like it that way, even if I am a coffee junkie. But it never smells bad in the office in exchange.

There is still some strange association with cleanliness and neat shirts.

The problem is, that alot of humanity still relies on cliches to communicate "base-truth". Suite and tie looks professional in movies, so you get more credit and respect for superficial looks on the job.

One must not support such a ridiculous look based culture by heart, its instead more a - "I want to reap the benefits & rewards from idiots in awed reference to work uniforms"

Ironically the same happened to the hoodie, after various hackermovies. Wear a hoodie and sit with a laptop, obviously improves your coding ability.

It’s not a ‘you’ problem per se, but just accepting that people are different, and that one size never fits all.

Nice clothes have a reason to exist, determining where that fits in your life or your teams’s life may be worth thinking about:)

But buttons, collars, ties, and other artefacts of 1500s tailoring technology have such respectability and gravitas!