I know it’s popular to criticize LinkedIn.
I’m also a fan of the many “LinkedIn Lunatics” videos on YouTube.
But I was never a frequent user myself and only really made my profile active when I was job hunting.
Still, I understand why someone might think:
“I should get clothing advice from LinkedIn because it’s for professionals.”
Perhaps.
But probably only for a certain type of environment.
Because LinkedIn isn’t really about normal, everyday professionalism.
It’s more about projecting a polished, visible image of professionalism.
Workplace signaling removed from the workplace
Your actual workplace already has its own signaling system.
But LinkedIn operates differently.
The platform extracts “professional identity” from the environment and turns it into a continuous signal.
You are no longer just connecting with old coworkers, sharing your resume or looking at job postings.
You are now performing employability.
That changes the type of clothing advice you receive too.
A lot of LinkedIn-style advice becomes less about ordinary environmental coherence and more about identity projection.
What do you want to communicate?
Competence?
Authority?
Approachability?
Leadership?
The clothing starts functioning more explicitly as semiotic language.
And naturally, most of that advice is going to reflect the perspective of the employer or institution.
Which is not necessarily wrong, but it’s still an incomplete picture because workplaces vary and people vary too .
Professional identity gets flattened into an image
Most LinkedIn profile photos are trying to communicate roughly the same qualities:
- competence
- approachability
- stability
The visual language becomes extremely standardized.
- Neutral background and clothing.
- Shallow depth of field.
- Soft corporate lighting.
- Shoulders angled slightly toward the camera.
- Not too smiley.
Once again everything is optimized for immediate legibility .
You are compressing professionalism into a single readable image.
“Professionalism” performed continuously
This is probably the part people react to most strongly.
A lot of what gets labeled as LinkedIn lunacy is really exaggerated signaling.
The improbable stories.
The HR morality lectures.
The inspirational leadership reposts.
These little LinkedIn parables are rarely believable because nobody actually talks like that in real life.
The messaging is way too clean.
LinkedIn often feels less about people working and more about people performing the idea of being professional.
If you get laid off now, there is almost an expectation that you write a long public breakup letter to your company:
thanking them for the opportunity
wishing everyone the best
sharing what you learned
You may or may not do any of that privately in real life.
I’ve been laid off, I’ve resigned, and I’ve been terminated. I’ve never felt the need to make any of those experiences public.
But online, the performance becomes expected.
Some people’s nervous systems tolerate that kind of identity-performance environment much better than others.
I figured out pretty early in my life that I don’t do well in big institutional settings for this reason.
The income was good and helped support my aesthetic addiction, but the more professionalism became continuously performed , the more draining the environment started feeling to me.
To be clear I’m not against professionalism.
I am against the constant performance of it though.
So that’s why I don’t think LinkedIn is the best place to learn how to dress for work.
The platform rewards intensified professionalism. But many workplaces function through much softer and more localized forms of coherence.
Sometimes the most socially successful person at work is not the most visibly optimized one. Just the person who feels naturally settled inside the environment.