The New Tiffany Table Settings

“The New Tiffany Table Settings” of 1981 is filled with simple to elegant tables and table settings, created by some of the most successful hosts and hostesses of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Below is the book’s foreword.

The history of modern table setting opened on a momentous day in 1633 when Charles I of England declared once and for all that “it is decent to use a fork.” Since then the table's arts have prospered while all manner of refinements and curiosities have been seen, some practical, some stylish, some simply preposterous.

Tables are as much as ever stages that we set for action, miniature theaters of social behavior where a good percentage of every life is played out. There love blossoms or withers, careers are made or undone, fortunes are founded or squandered. The table is a place for enjoyment, for wit, for discovery, for celebration, for art, for intrigue. There we set out props that forecast the order of events and that imply whatever we desire from social exchange.

Anyone can set a table, and anyone can set it well with whatever means are available, provided that imagination and vitality are both brought to the task. The success of a table setting depends not on financial considerations but on having a point of view, on having a personal style rather than timidly depending on bland and faceless conventionalities.

In the pages that follow, there are table settings done at the request of Tiffany & Co. by some seventy-five well-known personalities of society, entertainment, the arts, business, and design. They have brought to their settings the same flair and authority that have brought them such remarkable success in the world. Each setting is in a way the self-portrait of its author. There are no answers given to the question of how to set a table, but the collective answer is: “Do what you want, and do your best.”

In 1808 the great French authority on entertaining Alexandre Balthasar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière published his famed Manuel des Amphitryons. In it he exhorted the good host or hostess not to hold back or to be ashamed of originality and generosity, and his advice remains valid: “Don't be afraid to put your fortune in evidence and do honor to it; do nothing to pardon its sources as there is no more honorable way to use it than to offer food.” — Foreword from “The New Tiffany Table Settings,”1981

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