There was a post on a similar subject not too long ago, and it seems the landscape shifted about 10 years ago. A whole load of alt-lifestyle folks got into Linux and sysadmin, and maybe a few previously straight-laced sysadmins came out as alt too.
This is the second post with Unix and socks on my feed in the past few minutes.
There was a post about software and socks a few weeks or so ago where I replied about a company called functional software that made functional socks which I wore for years, which come to think about it also started a discussion about functional programming.
Anyway, here's a community where the socks seem to be coming from.