Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: we sell generated headshots, where what you wear in the uploads matters differently — that is at the end.
Most advice about what to wear for headshots is a list of colours. The colours barely matter. What matters is how fabric, pattern and neckline behave at the crop and the size the photograph will actually be seen, and those are physical constraints rather than style opinions.
Patterns that alias. Fine stripes, small checks and herringbone interfere with the sensor grid and produce moiré — a shimmering pattern that is impossible to remove afterwards and looks like a fault in the photograph. This is the single most common wardrobe failure and it is invisible until you see the file.
Necklines that vanish at the crop. A headshot is usually cropped at the upper chest. A wide or low neckline can leave you appearing to wear nothing at all in a tight crop, which is a distraction nobody intends. High and structured survives cropping; wide and soft does not.
Fabric that competes for attention. Anything shiny, anything with visible texture at a distance, anything that reflects colour onto your face. A satin shirt puts a colour cast under your chin. Matte fabrics do not.
Tones too close to your background or your skin. If your top and the backdrop sit at similar brightness, your shoulders disappear and your head floats. If it is too close to your skin tone, the same happens at the neckline. When the clothing is fixed and the problem is the backdrop, changing the background is the cheaper fix — it costs nothing and does not need a reshoot.
Solid colours in mid-tones. Not white, which blows out and pulls exposure off your face. Not black, which loses all shape and turns into a void at small sizes. A mid-blue, a grey, a deep green, a burgundy — anything with enough tone to read as a shape.
Necklines with structure: a collar, a crew that sits high, a jacket lapel. Something that gives the frame a line.
Layers, if the register allows them, because a jacket over a top gives the photograph depth and gives you two looks from one setup.
The wardrobe question is really a register question, and it varies more by profession than by fashion. Law and finance sit at the formal end and the acceptable range is narrow. Medicine wants clinical or business dress and a plain background. Therapy and teaching want visibly softer — the warmth is the point rather than a concession. Technology and creative work tolerate almost anything, which is its own trap, because "anything" produces the mismatched team page.
If you are one of many on a company page, the register is set by the page rather than by you. Match it.
Photograph yourself in the candidate outfit, shrink it to about 50 pixels, and look at it beside other people's. At that size you are checking two things only: does your head have an outline, and does your top read as a shape rather than as a smudge. Almost every wardrobe problem shows up in that test and almost none of them show up at full size.
The rules change, because you are choosing what to wear in the uploads rather than in the output. Two things follow.
Wear plain, structured, mid-tone clothing in your selfies, for the same reasons as above — the model learns from what it sees, and a busy pattern in the input produces artefacts in the output.
And expect to lose anything with text on it. Logos, badges, lanyards and branded workwear come back as convincing-looking gibberish across every tool in the category. If your work clothing carries a logo, the generated route will not preserve it, and the free tier of up to 10 images is the cheapest way to confirm that on your own wardrobe before paying.