What to wear to a casino night

Casino night is one of those occasions where the name does most of the damage. It suggests something between a Bond film and a stag do, and people arrive dressed for both, which is how you end up with a room containing one dinner jacket, one novelty visor, and forty people in the middle looking faintly uncertain.

The correct answer is narrower than it sounds, and less formal than the phrase implies.

Work out what kind of casino night it is

There are basically three, and they want different things from you.

A charity or corporate casino night, usually in a hotel function room with fake chips, sits at the dressy end. A friend's casino night at somebody's house is a normal evening out with a theme bolted on. An actual casino, in an actual casino, is usually the least formal of the three, because most of them have a dress code that stops at "no sportswear" and nothing more.

If you are unsure which one you are going to, ask whoever invited you whether people are dressing up. It is a completely normal question and it takes ten seconds.

The default that works

Dark, sharp, and one degree more formal than you would wear to a bar. A dark shirt or a good knit, tailored trousers rather than jeans, leather shoes. If you own a blazer, this is the occasion for it.

The theme rewards contrast and clean lines more than it rewards anything literal. You are aiming to look like you belong in a room with low lighting and green baize, and that is mostly about the darkness of the colours and the fit of the shoulders.

Where people get it wrong

Overdressing is the more common failure and the more forgivable one. A dinner jacket at a house party is awkward for about ten minutes and then becomes a running joke you can live with.

Underdressing is worse because it cannot be fixed on the night. Trainers and a t-shirt at a hotel function room will keep you slightly outside the evening for its whole duration, and there is nothing you can do about it once you are there.

When you genuinely cannot tell, aim just above the middle. Slightly too smart is a much cheaper mistake.

Small things that carry it

• Shoes you can stand up in for four hours, because you will be standing.
• One metal thing, a watch or a ring, and no more than that.
• Pockets, or a bag. You will be holding chips, a phone and a drink at the same time.
• Something with a bit of texture. Under low light, flat black goes completely dead.

You probably own it already

Read that list back and there is nothing on it you would need to buy. A dark shirt, decent trousers, leather shoes and one watch is not an exotic set of requirements. It is a description of clothes most people already have and cannot summon to mind on the night.

Which is what Rate My Fit Now is for. Photograph what you own, then type "casino night" and it builds the outfit from your own wardrobe, one piece per category, with a reason for each. You can see the whole thing on a photo of yourself before you get changed.

The clothes were never the problem. Finding them at seven o'clock was.