In 2013, researcher Karen Keogan at Dublin Business School published a finding that should be required reading for anyone who has ever prepared for an interview, a presentation, or a meeting where the outcome matters.
When two candidates have equal skills, equal experience, and equal qualifications, the deciding factor in supervisory evaluations is clothing appearance.
Not personality. Not communication style. Not the quality of the answers. Clothing.
This is not an indictment of the people making the evaluations. It is a description of how the brain works when information is scarce. When two candidates are genuinely equivalent on the dimensions that matter — skills, experience, aptitude — the decision-maker's brain reaches for the available differentiator. Clothing is visible, immediate, and highly information-rich. It activates a cascade of rapid judgements that feel like intuition but are actually systematic pattern-matching.
Understanding what those judgements are and how to manage them is not vanity. It is professional strategy.
The Seven-Second Window
Research on first impression formation is consistent: initial impressions form within seven seconds of meeting, and the majority of that information is visual.
In a job interview, the interviewer forms an impression of the candidate before a word has been spoken. That impression — once formed — is resilient. It biases the interpretation of everything that follows. A candidate who makes a strong positive first impression has their subsequent answers interpreted charitably. A candidate who makes a weak or incongruent first impression must work against that bias throughout the conversation.
Clothing is the primary variable in those seven seconds because it is the largest, most immediately visible element of the person. Colour, fit, and overall coherence are processed rapidly and automatically — before the conscious assessment has begun.
What Colour Signals
Research by Labrecque and Milne (2011), published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, established consistent colour-personality signal patterns that operate across professional contexts:
Blue signals competence, reliability, and trustworthiness. Every bank, every law firm, every healthcare institution defaults to blue in their branding for this reason — the association is near-universal and operates below conscious awareness. A candidate in a deep structured blue conveys reliability and precision before they have said anything.
Dark neutrals (charcoal, deep navy, dark grey) signal authority and control. They communicate that the wearer is serious, organised, and in command. The formality of the dark neutral activates the authority schema — the same enclothed cognition mechanism documented by Adam and Galinsky.
Red signals energy, passion, and urgency. In modest quantities — a scarf, a tie, a single accent piece — it communicates dynamism. In excess, particularly as an all-red suit, it can read as aggressive or attention-seeking rather than authoritative.
Warm camel and brown tones signal approachability, warmth, and accessibility. These are the colours of established trust — senior professionals who no longer need to signal authority because it is assumed. Wearing them in an interview context can communicate over-familiarity before the relationship has been established.
Wrong-season colours send a subtler signal: something is slightly off. The face looks less alert, the skin slightly flat, the overall impression slightly strained. The interviewer cannot identify why. They register it as a faint sense of incongruence — which, translated into evaluation, often shows up as reduced confidence in the candidate.
Power Dressing by Season
The conventional wisdom on professional dressing — navy and black for authority, minimal colour, conservative cut — was developed without any reference to individual colouring. It works reliably for cool-season people (Summers and Winters) because navy and black are cool, high-contrast colours that sit within their season.
For warm-season people (Springs and Autumns), the conventional wisdom is counterproductive. Cool navy and stark black fight a warm undertone. The face looks flat, the skin reads slightly grey, and the impression of alert authority — which is the whole purpose of the power dressing convention — is undermined by the temperature conflict.
The solution is not to abandon the professional signalling intent. It is to achieve the same signal in season-appropriate colours.
Spring power palette: warm teal or teal-green, warm dark olive, warm cognac-brown. These are the Spring equivalents of authority — dark enough, structured enough, and in the right temperature. A Spring in warm dark teal reads as competent and present in a way that the same Spring in stark navy does not.
Summer power palette: soft navy, cool charcoal, cool slate, muted plum. Summers can wear the conventional professional palette with one adjustment: avoid stark black, which can be too high-contrast for the softer Summer colouring. Soft navy is a more harmonious authority colour.
Autumn power palette: dark warm brown, dark olive, deep warm charcoal, cognac. Earth-tone authority — grounded, assured, present. An Autumn in dark warm olive commands a room in a way that is entirely different from but equally authoritative as a Winter in black.
Winter power palette: black, navy-black, cool dark charcoal, deep plum. This is the one season for which the conventional advice is perfectly calibrated. Stark black and deep navy are literally Winter's power colours — not a compromise but an ideal.
What 'Appearance' Actually Means
When research identifies clothing appearance as the tiebreaker in equal-candidate evaluations, it is important to clarify what appearance means in this context.
It does not mean attractiveness. Physical attractiveness has its own literature and its own set of findings, but it is not what Keogan's research is measuring. The relevant dimension is congruence: does this person look like they belong in this role? Does their presentation signal the qualities — competence, reliability, preparedness, self-awareness — that the role requires?
A candidate who has clearly thought about their presentation and dressed with intentional control communicates self-awareness and preparation before a word is spoken. A candidate who appears to have made no deliberate choices communicates the opposite.
The clothing does not need to be expensive or fashionable. It needs to be coherent, appropriate, and in season. Coherent: everything works together, the temperature is consistent, nothing is fighting anything else. Appropriate: the level of formality matches the context. In season: the colours harmonise with the face, producing the impression of alert, natural confidence rather than effort.
The Interview Application
Combining the colour signalling research with season knowledge produces a practical framework for interview dressing:
Identify the signal the role requires. Most professional roles require competence and reliability first. Some creative roles welcome dynamism and energy. Leadership roles may require both. Choose the primary signal and dress for it.
Find the season-appropriate version of that signal. Competence and reliability → blue family for your season. Authority and control → dark neutrals for your season. Dynamism → saturated version of your season's palette.
Add a single approachability element. A single lighter, softer piece near the face — a scarf, a blouse, a tie — in a warm-ish or softer version of your palette. Pure authority reads as intimidating in interview contexts. Authority plus one human note reads as the ideal candidate.
Verify in good light before leaving. The most common interview dressing mistake is a garment chosen under artificial light at home that looks different under office fluorescent. Verify the colour-face harmony under natural light.
Beyond the Interview
The professional signalling framework extends beyond the interview to every high-stakes professional context: presentations, board meetings, first meetings with new clients, performance reviews.
The consistent principle is this: the colours near your face communicate your cognitive and professional state to every person who looks at you, before you have said anything. Right-season colours make that communication unambiguous — the face looks alert, the impression is coherent, the authority signal is transmitted cleanly. Wrong-season colours introduce noise: something seems slightly off, and the signal is degraded.
You cannot fully control what others perceive. You can control the variables that consistently and predictably influence that perception. Colour, season, and professional dressing are three of those variables.
Use them deliberately.
Sources: Keogan, K. (2013). Dress, identity and self-concept. BA Thesis, Dublin Business School. Labrecque, L. I. & Milne, G. R. (2011). Exciting red and competent blue. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 40(5). Adam, H. & Galinsky, A. D. (2012). Enclothed cognition. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4).