Smart casual is halfway between dressed up and dressed down: here’s how to do it | Jess Cartner-Morley

Smart casual is not just a dress code – it is modern life in outfit form. Smart casual dressing tells the world that you are someone who gets it. It shows that you know how the world works now, what the spoken and unspoken rules are.

If a pinstripe suit and a pocket square make you look creaky and antiquated and ripped jeans and a scruffy T-shirt make you look a bit of a loose cannon, smart casual – say, for the sake of argument, a stripe shirt with pleat-front trousers, chunky-soled loafers and a couple of necklaces – identifies you as someone who can be relied upon to steer a path through the middle ground.

Let me put it like this. Say you go for dinner to a nice restaurant. If you turn up in ripped jeans and a scruffy T-shirt, your friends might get the idea that you’d rather be home with a takeaway on the sofa, and that can make them feel uncomfortable.

Rock up in the pinstripes and pocket square, on the other hand, and they start to worry that you are expecting silver service and are going to kick off about the modishly uncomfortable bench seating. In the era of small-plates dining, when modern manners are not about how to hold a fish fork but about how to divide a quail between three people without splattering anyone with miso butter, the well-dressed diner needs to show they can walk a delicate line.

There are some things to bear in mind though. Smart and casual are not two fillings that you smoosh together like peanut butter and jelly in a sandwich. Not a fancy top with low-fi bottoms, or vice versa. That way chaos lies.

The way to make smart casual look intentional rather than a bit all over the place is to think of it as a smart outfit that you are simply making a little bit more casual. You could also approach it the other way, starting with a casual outfit and making it a little bit smart. But in practical terms I find it is easier to ease up a formal look than to smarten up an informal one.

It helps if you think of smart casual as about looking modern rather than a halfway house between dressed up and dressed down. So we start with a straightforward template for looking smart – a cotton shirt and tailored trousers, say. What you are aiming for is to make this look a bit cooler and less stuffy. It’s not just about leaving the suit jacket off or rolling up the sleeves of your slim-fit cotton shirt. That was smart casual two decades ago – and just Rishi Sunak today.

One easy trick to make the proportions look breezier is to choose an oversized shirt so it blousons out over the waistband of your trousers.

Another is to make the shoes chunky. Instead of classic slim-profile loafers, bring some bounce with a chunky lug-soled supersized version. Which you might want to accentuate with a colourful or glittery pair of socks. The older I get, the more I appreciate the power of a great pair of socks.

Or maybe you want to start with a dress. The best way to make a smart dress casual is to do something unexpected with it. You could layer a red cotton polo neck or a Breton T-shirt underneath a dress with a deep V neckline. Or you could dial down the tea-party cuteness of a floral dress by layering a neutral knit sweater vest over the top.

Don’t overcomplicate it, because if you are doing it right you need to make it look effortless. Just like modern life.

Model: Ana at Body London. Hair and makeup: Sophie Higginson using Davines and Dermalogica. Shell print shirt: H&M. Trousers: Mango. Shoes: Ivylee