It seems a little disingenuous to bring up cases like that alongside your examples of bankers and artists
I don't think so. We don't respect police officers because of the costume they wear, but the position they hold. I put them next to judges for a reason. The costume is certainly useful out on the streets, but it is not the source of their authority. Plainclothes undercover cops are still cops.
Okay at this point I'm afraid not following you, sol. You're saying it doesn't matter whether cops on in plain clothes or in uniform, correct? And this is an argument that clothing style matters?
Or are you saying the reason police officers wear uniforms isn't because it is important to be able to recognize who they are?
Doctors wear white coats. Why? They certainly aren't a required part of the job, but they help put patients at ease because the costume conveys the authority of their position.
Here again I have to disagree. From the few doctors I know who know well enough to talk about this stuff (N=2 so talk it with a grain of salt), they wear white coats because there are lots of people running around a hospital in scrubs, no one can keep track of everyone's name and face, and they feel it is important to immediately know who had an MD and who doesn't at a glance.
I don't know how much of that has to do with knowing who can be reliably be asked to do what in a medical emergency, and how much is about maintaining an social hierarchy among hospital employees but it doesn't seem like it is driven by the desire to create a certain impression in patients/customers. My guess that it's mostly about signaling to other hospital employees is also most consistent with there being lots of nuances that people outside of the hospital staff won't enough know to look for, like med students wearing shorter white lab coats that, depending on the school, won't even fully cover their butts.
Looks matter, when you're dealing with the public. Bankers are "supposed" to wear business suits. Mechanics are "supposed" to wear coveralls. These things are just subtle signals to your customers that you are qualified for you job, and in professions where interacting with customers (like doctors, bankers, and mechanics all do) matters, then you run the risk of subverting that expectation by breaking the dress code. It's not illegal or anything, just personally harmful. A doctor could totally meet with patients just as well while wearing coveralls, but none of them do.
Indeed, but many doctors do meet with patients without wearing a lab coat, (for example in scrubs) depending on the circumstances. I agree it'd be surprising to see a doctor walking around the hospital in coveralls, even though coveralls and scrubs basically perform the same function.
I've dropped my car off with mechanics who were wearing a t-shirt and jeans and others who were coveralls. The fact that it didn't bother me one way or the other is anecdotal, but the fact that I see lots of mechanics not wearing coveralls and they don't seem to be going out of business would seem to indicate that if the clothes are a signaling mechanism to the general public in that particular profession, it's not a particularly strong or critical one.
Look, I'm not trying to argue that the way people dress on the job has no impact on how they're going to be perceived and evaluated. I'm just saying that when you put aside outlier professions like police, there generally isn't an absolute reason we need people from profession X to look like Y. What is left is squishy matters of expectation and recognition, and that's stuff where a motivated individual can come up with other ways to handle the same job that would otherwise be handled by their physical appearance.