The Journal · The Brantford Club

Smart Casual, Defined by a Club That Enforces One

Smart casual is a dress code for clothes neat and in good repair but short of a suit: a collared shirt or blouse, trousers or chinos, a skirt or day dress, dark jeans without rips, closed shoes. Shorts, collarless t-shirts, ripped denim, and hats are the standard exclusions, and The Brantford Club prints that list for its dining room.

The two words are older than most guessers put them: the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence for “smart casual” is from 1936, in the Toronto Star. The Brantford Club has set a dining room at 98 George Street since 1898 and publishes a smart casual code for it, with the banned garments named. A code is only a definition once somebody has to apply it at a door. The Club’s rule, read for Brantford, is in the Club’s own code, decoded; this piece is the national definition, for whatever card is in your hand.

What is a smart casual dress code?

A smart casual dress code asks you to dress one step above your everyday clothes and one step below business dress. The Cambridge Dictionary defines the phrase as clothing that is “neat and stylish, but not too formal, especially when this is the accepted way of dressing for a particular situation, place, or social occasion,” and the last clause does the work: the place sets the code. Still, the phrase has a stable core. The top has a collar, or it is a blouse or a knit. The trousers are chinos, wool, corduroy, or dark denim with no holes. A jacket is welcome and never required; a tie belongs to a different code. The Club’s dining-room list of what fails is a short one: collarless t-shirts, shorts, ripped jeans, and hats. Printed house rules are older than printed dress codes; the wording the Rideau Club used for a stranger in 1896 settled which rooms a visitor could enter and when the privilege ended.

What Is In and What Is Out, for Men and for Women

For men

In: a collared shirt in cotton or linen; a polo shirt; a crewneck or quarter-zip sweater over a shirt; chinos, wool trousers, corduroys, or dark straight-leg jeans without distressing; a blazer or sports jacket; loafers, derbies, chelsea boots, or plain leather trainers kept clean. Out: any t-shirt without a collar, shorts, cargo trousers, ripped or frayed denim, tracksuits and hoodies, running shoes, flip-flops, and any hat worn indoors. A tie is neither in nor out; it moves the outfit into business dress.

For women

In: a blouse, a shirt, a fine knit, or a shell top under a cardigan; tailored trousers, or a skirt at the knee or below; a day dress, a wrap dress, or a shirt dress; dark jeans without rips; flats, loafers, ankle boots, or a block heel. Out: shorts, ripped jeans, leggings worn as trousers, hoodies, sequins and floor-length gowns, rubber flip-flops, and hats indoors, a religious head covering excepted.

The Same Two Words in Five Rooms

The phrase never arrives alone; it comes on a card that belongs to a room, and the room sets the reading.

The Mistakes People Make

The commonest mistake is reading the noun and skipping the adjective. In “smart casual” the noun is casual and the adjective is smart; a person who dresses for the noun arrives in a t-shirt. The second is dressing for the phrase instead of the room, a pocket square at a pub lunch or a polo at a wedding. The hat is the third; it fails nearly every published code in the country, and the Club bans it in the casual pub as well as the dining room. Shorts in July are the fourth, on the theory that summer suspends the code; the rule at 98 George Street has no season. The last is trusting a general list over the host’s printed one; the printed one wins.

Where the Phrase Comes From

The Oxford English Dictionary enters “smart casual” as both adjective and noun, and gives its earliest evidence as 1936, in the Toronto Star. “Smart” there carries its older sense of neat and well turned out, so a phrase that sounds like a contradiction asks only for casual clothes worn smartly. The OED’s frequency chart has the phrase climbing in every decade from the 1940s to the 2010s, which anyone over fifty has watched at a dinner table: the tie left, the jacket became optional, and a name was needed for what remained. A Toronto newspaper was using the words two years before The Brantford Club’s fortieth year, and the dining room that opened on the last night of 1898 has been reset for every stage of that change. The record holds no agreed list of garments, which is why this definition sits beside a code from a house that applies one.

In, Out, or It Depends

What the invitation left out

Sources: the Oxford English Dictionary entry “smart casual, adj. & n.” (earliest evidence 1936, Toronto Star); the Cambridge Dictionary entry for “smart casual”; the Club’s policies page, read in September 2026. More is in the rest of the Journal; the roll is described on the membership page.