What are clothes for? To protect us from elements, to cover us, to make us look good, give us a certain sense of identity? Probably all of them? So what does appropriate mean here? From a perspective on weather and climate, or activity, or culture, or identity?
Dress codes are cultural innovations and we need to see how we are interacting with the culture whenever we dress in certain ways. The awareness of this allows us to gain some agency to decide, what we are really dressing for and which goal we want to pursue in our choice.
Of course, I’m really not really talking about dressing but the many other choices in life we make so subconsciously or without conscious thought that we take them for granted. We forget that we are playing by cultural rules, we even forget that we actually have a choice in terms of what purpose we can choose to serve.