Business Casual Attire

Business casual attire is often a point of confusion for many professional white collar work environments. Most company's have attempted to define their own business casual dress guidelines.

Unfortunately, in doing so they have created some of the ambiguity of business casual guidelines. Variation from company to company, industry to industry etc. and lack of any international standards leave the interpretation of business casual attire for men open ended.

We would like to assist in defining business casual dress guidelines and provide you confidence and comfort in knowing that you are dressed appropriately for business casual expectations.

Let's keep it simple and start with the business suit (pictured left)......this is the Standard International Business Attire: Dress shirt with turndown collar, tie, suit jacket & trousers cut from same fabric (likely wool) and a fine pair of leather dress shoes.

This attire is consistently and reliably understood to be business attire. It is also noteable that what you see pictured here is also the standard definition of "Informal Wear" (just in case you were not aware).

If you remove the tie and the suit jacket you quickly move into the higher end of what would be considered appropriate Business Casual Attire:

1.) Wool dress slacks/trousers

2.) Crisply pressed dress shirt with a turndown collar

3.) Fine leather shoes - with a matching belt

Now, with the 3 items above you may begin to substitute fabrics, colors, patterns and design elements to achieve hundreds of acceptable business caual dress variations.

Let's take a look at an example: Pictured here we have a monochromatic theme.

Grey patterned dress shirt with a collar. Black flat front dress slacks. Black belt and presumably a pair of black dress loafers.

This is a great example of acceptable business casual dress for men. It's stylish but well within the guidelines of expected norms.

You can interchange the dress shirt with other solid colors (white works with most anything) and/or other patterns and colors.

You can keep the shirt and go with pleated black slacks, variations of grey (pleated or not), khaki (flat front) etc. and still remain well within the business casual dress guidelines. business attire

Another example at right shows how you might dress up your flat front khaki pants with a blazer. The traditional blue blazer pairs nicely with these khaki's but would work equally well with a pair of grey slacks and/or a pair of natural color wool dress slacks.

As you can see, business casual can be simple. If you just imagine a suit & tie without the jacket & tie then you have the foundation for acceptable business causual dress code anywhere in the business community.

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