What to wear for a LinkedIn headshot

Most advice about what to wear for a headshot is really advice about what to wear to an office. That is a different question. A profile picture is looked at small — a circle a hundred pixels across, on a phone, for about a second — and clothes behave differently at that size.

That is doubly true on LinkedIn, where the photo is shown as a small circle beside your name.

Three things decide whether an outfit survives it.

Plain beats patterned

A check shirt, a fine stripe, a busy print: at full size they are texture, and at profile-picture size they are noise. Some patterns do worse than noise and shimmer, which is the same effect that makes a striped shirt strobe on video.

Plain colours hold their shape all the way down. So do large, simple patterns — a saree border, a wide block print — because there are only a few shapes in the frame rather than a hundred.

A collar gives the picture structure

A collar draws a line under the face, and in a small circle that line does a lot of work: it separates head from body and stops the whole picture reading as a floating face.

You do not need one. A plain crew neck reads softer and more approachable, and for some jobs that is exactly right. Heavy knitwear reads as texture — good in a large picture, mush in a small one.

Colour is about the background, not about you

The usual rule — "wear a colour that suits you" — is the wrong rule here. What matters is whether you separate from what is behind you. Navy against a bright window works because the window is bright. Navy against a dark room does not.

If you do not want to think about it, mid-tones are the safe answer: they have somewhere to go in both directions.

Traditional dress is business dress

A saree, a kurta, a churidar, a nehru jacket. Half the working world wears these to meet clients, and they are choices in the picker rather than an afterthought — described properly when the picture is made, down to the woven border and the embroidery, rather than as "traditional clothing".

What to leave off

• A logo, unless it is your own company's. You are advertising for someone else on the one picture that is meant to be about you.
• A lanyard or a badge. It dates the picture to one job.
• Something brand new. Stiff, unworn clothes photograph stiff.

And the one that matters most

Wear something you own and have worn. A jacket bought for the photograph looks like a jacket bought for the photograph, and the first person to notice will be whoever you meet afterwards.

---

You choose all of this before anything is made — the clothes, the room, the light — and see a spread to pick from. $25.00 for eight HD headshots, $35.00 for sixteen HD headshots, or $49.00 for twenty-four HD headshots. What each pack includes.