I think scruffiness privilege also correlates with bodily and social characteristics such as gender (and conformity to gender roles for a specific area), ethnicity/nationality, perceived social class and disability and age. All of these can be actual, or perceived. Then there's the social norms of the workplace itself. IT/tech being a very specific niche area where a certain scruffiness is normalised, valorised or just expected for white men. I would say historically academia was similar, male professors could be as scruffy as they liked, but women and other minorities could not be scruffy in the same way and be taken seriously. I'm a cisgender, middle class, white woman, but I'm disabled. A lot of my impairments are not visible as "disability" at casual glance - I just 'look a bit weird' to the people who care about such things (some people don't notice often cos they don't judge by appearances so much). I have also failed the femininity expectation tests many times because I don't wear skirts, high heels, makeup or fashionable/femme clothing. I always have to dress 1-2 levels up to be taken seriously in work. Even in business casual workplaces I'll wear a black trouser suit (trousers + jacket) and plain tee-shirt like top which is how I balance society/workplace femininity-expectations with what I can tolerate. At home I live in jeans and teeshirts/hoodies like many people regardless of gender who are in their 40s. In one 90% female workplace other women (many who I otherwise liked) complained I wore too many identical outfits and my clothing was too monochrome. I bought and wore 5 identical coloured tops with the same black trousers/jackets and the moaning stopped. An excellent male colleague noticed this and commented that no one complained that he wore (the male equivalent) a white shirt and black trousers every day. Until my mid-30s, older people (especially women) in the workplace assumed I was 21 or younger (even when the maths didn't add up) and therefore not experienced or competent. As these older people were often my managers, they had power over me and things like my appraisal ratings and opportunities. Despite being extremely good at one of my jobs, having the strongest relationships with others across team, highest positive feedback scores etc, I was undermined by ageism, sexism and disablism. I had to learn a lot of social-manipulation skills (the hard way) to get myself taken seriously - hence the dressing up, with enough colour not to trigger comments. The people who noticed the scruffiness-policing in the workplace (without me having to explain or identify it) have always been working class and or people of colour or other disabled people. To be fair, I didn't realise about scruffiness-policing outside of work environments until friends who are people of colour described how their parents always ensured everyone in the household was extremely neat at all times. Not through snobbiness, but survival in a racist and sometimes dangerous world. As for school uniforms, my view is similar to Tony Hoyle above, at my school (with a clear 1/3 very posh and 1/3 very poor demographic) we had no blazers but could tell the kids who wore dirty uniform cos they were poor (or wore sports uniform or trainers in class cos they had nothing else, which the shitty teachers never considered) vs the kids with clean uniforms and indeed smarter shoes within the dress code.