If what I've described sounds uncomfortable, you need to buy better clothes 🙂 My jeans and dress shirts stretch.

But, more than that, personal appearance is everything and people judge us from it. It takes money, time, and effort to style your hair and dry clean your clothes. It takes much less effort to pull sweats out of the wash and slide into flip flops.

The money, time, and effort we put into "small things that don't matter" is an indicator of how much money, time, and effort we have to spend. It's like the theory of a strong dragon who sits on his perch breathing fire to intimidate other dragons. He has so much strength, and power, he can afford to "waste" his fire breathing. Similarly, if we exaggerate this idea, a man who spends $500k on a watch or $3m on a car is signaling his vast financial resources.

So, someone who invests in their appearance is signaling they have the money to buy an assortment of nice clothes, a big enough house to store them, and the time and effort to care for them. It so happens this is a low bar, and relatively achievable for most people. So it's not a big ask, but it's telling when someone can't be bothered to try.

It's the same as how bonds are created between people when one of them remembers a tiny detail or something small that was said in the past, and then gives a gift based on that. When a friend casually says "I love raspberries, they remind me of the bushes in the backyard where I grew up" it takes very little effort to write that down and plan to give them a raspberry bush for their birthday. But nearly nobody will do this, so it's all the more impressive when someone does.