What smart casual actually means
Smart casual is the most used and least defined dress code in English. It appears on wedding invitations, restaurant websites and office handbooks, and it means something different in each.
The working definition
Smart casual is a smart outfit with one relaxed element, or a casual outfit with one smart one. A blazer with jeans. Chinos with a plain knit. A dress with flat shoes. The tension between the two halves is the point: fully smart is business dress, and fully casual is the weekend.
The reliable test is whether you could walk into a decent restaurant without feeling underdressed, and into a friend's kitchen without looking like you came from a meeting. If both are true, you have it.
It shifts with the setting
At a wedding it sits close to formal: assume a jacket, skip the tie. At a restaurant it usually means no trainers and no shorts, and little else. In an office it is the everyday standard, which in practice means dark jeans or chinos and a shirt or knit.
That is why the phrase causes confusion. The words do not change, the room does.
The things that read as wrong
- Trainers, unless they are clean, plain and leather, and even then not everywhere
- Anything with a visible logo across the chest
- Faded or ripped denim, where dark and plain denim would have been fine
- A suit, which is the other failure and reads as having ignored the request
- Shorts, at almost any event where somebody bothered to state a dress code
Building one from your own clothes
Smart casual is the dress code most likely to already be sitting in your wardrobe, because it is made of ordinary pieces in a particular combination. The difficulty is seeing the combination. Photograph what you own, describe the occasion, and the pairing tends to be obvious once it is in front of you.