I'm a consulting engineer. I was hired as an outside consultant to lead a local team of SMEs/designers and another off-site team of implementers for a very important strategic project. My client was a huge multi-national.

Every day I wore at least dress pants, a dress shirt and tie. The SMEs all wore jeans and there were plenty of t-shirts in the warm months.

One day, there was an unannounced visit from a Senior VP who happened to be in the country and stopped by the country HQ where I was working. My office was a few doors down from the country manager's. When the Senior VP went for a stroll with the country manager, I was talking with a group of 5 or 6 senior engineers. The Senior VP gravitated to me for answers before he knew who I was, and he pretty much ignored everyone else. Eventually we went back to my office and had a long and interesting talk (turns out he was also an engineer).

The only difference between me and those around me was that I was nicely dressed and no one else was. This was in the Netherlands, where several of the guys were the same height or taller. Almost all were younger than me. Most all thin (again, the Netherlands).

The Senior VP and I developed a relationship that continued until our contract was complete, even though he was back near corporate HQ on a different continent.

I believe it was all started by the fact that every day I went to the client site wearing Hugo Boss instead of looking like I was heading for a night at the pub or the beach.