Presence · 5 min
Dressing for the room you're actually in
Seniority is read before you speak. Most people dress for the job they had two roles ago.
What I would keep
Clean lines, deliberate colour, one point of interest — chosen by you.
What I would change
The safe, slightly apologetic uniform you adopted when you were the most junior person present.
Why
Understatement only reads as authority when it is obviously a choice. Otherwise it reads as absence.
There is a version of professional dressing designed to avoid being noticed. It works, briefly, when you are new. It stops working the moment your job requires people to follow you.
The shift is not towards louder clothes. It is towards clothes that are visibly decided. A considered colour. A precise length. One detail that could not be an accident.
I ask clients a simple question: if someone walked into the room and had to guess who was leading it, what would they use to decide? The answer is almost never a logo. It is posture, fit and intent — and two of those three are things I can fix by Friday.