> There may be subtle variations available to men, but the simple fact is that many fewer people notice or care.

I wouldn’t say that’s the takeaway, even with a simple navy suit you have a lot of options.

What that article does do though is highlight just how low the bar is for men to dress.

It's caring about the wrong thing if you're looking to improve your life though. You need to logically reason through norms and expectations and realize you gotta put on the correct costume for the setting, even if you don't identify with it.

Otherwise "Thats not me" will be describing things like "successful career" and "romantic relationships".

I wonder how clean the clothes looked, however. Clothes can be well worn but still appear clean and taken care of. There is a difference between "this is my favorite shirt" and "these are my grubbies I use while cleaning the house".

A man still strongly emotionally attached to faded, worn out logos from many years ago is probably not an appealing signal to most women looking for a man to date.

I was going to comment something similar to this. To an extent, dressing and grooming well is a sign of respect you show to other people as well as to yourself. If you can't clear that relatively low bar, don't be surprised when people aren't super excited about what you might add to their lives.

> showing that you care about how other people see you is a proxy signal for caring about other people.

It's a very bad proxy for that—its somewhere between uncorrelated and anti-correlated to thing it is taken as a signal for (at least, if “caring about” is meant as having a positive concern for the feelings of rather than a desire to manipulate to extract value)—though (which makes caring about that signal itself a kind of signal.)

> showing that you care about how other people see you is a proxy signal for caring about other people

How so?

I wish the people who thought that was true would give me money instead of buying a suit.

By the way, in academia dressing like a salesman is often considered a no-no.

I worked for a downtown firm for a while which loosened up dress code a little bit so I didn’t always wear my jacket in—though cargo pants and rock T would definitely have led to an HR meeting. One day I had to borrow a jacket from someone when I had to go to a nearby studio for a TV interview:-)

I find that buttoned shirts only work if your belly is flat, so you can wear it in your pants.

With even a tiny bit of belly fat, ime it is better to just wear a t-shirt and not wear it in your pants.

Can you elaborate?

Well yes.

Both of those choices express a lot.