Well many books go to great length to describe how characters look and dress...if you disagree then that's just wasted space....

I however tend to agree and thus I'll react in a different way to someone dressed in a suit vs rags....an elf vs human....whatever the stereotype may be is usually important in a book.

An entire book was written about the letter A stitched on a woman's clothes....

She probably didn't want to tell you the answer as it would impact the way you did the assignment...