Transcription
Your appearance is judged by other people in milliseconds. It's called thin slicing and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
I've been in places where someone walks in within seconds decisions have been made. Do they belong here or do they need to be managed? And you can see all the shift. Body language changes, attention changes, the way people respond changes and from that point on everything that person says or does is being filtered through the initial judgment.
I saw this play out in a hotel once. A woman arrived dressed head to toe in interlocking G's raising her voice at reception asking three times if they knew who she was. The person I was with called it Towey savagery. It stuck because once someone is categorized everything they do gets interpreted through that frame.
That's why appearance matters. It's fast, it's imperfect, but it sets the direction for everything that follows. And if you don't understand how that judgment is being made, you'll spend the rest of the interaction trying to recover from it.