This summer it's all about Table Dressing: the art of dressing to match your table

With 2020 the year of at-home dining and ‘tablescaping’, Chloe Street explores the art of matching your drapery to your napery
Chloe Street11 September 2020

While lockdown made Masterchefs and mixology maestros of many, for others the focus on at-home dining has given the art of laying a beautiful table newfound import.

From fashion girl favourite Matilda Goad’s deliciously retro scalloped trim napkins to the sell-out success of super stylish Campbell Rey’s colourful coupes, the at-home life has made table dressing devotees of the city’s aesthetes – and there are already over a million Instagram posts with the hashtag ‘tablescape’ to prove it.

We delight in matching our charger plates to our salad servers and our candlesticks to our napkin holders, but why should the symphony of synchronicity stop at the table?

British fashion brand Yolke this week launched a garden party-ready collection of hand-painted lemon and orange-print puff sleeve dresses, pyjamas, skirts and blouses alongside sets of napkins and tablecloths in identical prints. Brand founder Ella Ringner debuted the coordinating concept with a Foxglove pattern back in February, and found sales – and selfies – rocketed in lockdown. “It’s such a joy to match your dress to the table,” she says. “When you sit at the table wearing a matching dress it’s always a conversation starter.”

When it comes to titillating table-cum-outfit ensembles, few do it better than super glamorous ‘grammer and Vogue contributor Alice Naylor-Leyland (@mraslice), whose high gloss country house banquets are so popular she launched her own ‘tablescape in a box’ company back in November. For her, a fabulous outfit is a key component of the mis en scene: “It’s about the whole picture… you sit down at the table and it’s lovely for your outfit to echo the table and vice versa.” The key to a great shot, she believes, is to keep it seasonal. “I think when you’re in a lovely spring dress that is going to echo the feel of your lovely spring table… I normally match without thinking.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by fellow country pile Insta-star Paula Sutton (@hillhousevintage), whose feed is a gloriously colourful ode to 1950s full-skirted dresses and bucolic bliss. “Coordinating is not something I do totally consciously,” she says. “My whole aesthetic has that sort of English country house nostalgic feel, and that just follows through both to how I dress and how I dress up my table.”

Keen to embrace the trend and match your napery to your drapery? Yolke’s luxey linens are fool proof Insta-fodder; alternatively the high street is chock-full of gingham and floral dresses for which you could easily find a table-friendly twin. And with garden lunches continuing to reign all-important on our summer social agenda, why not go game, set, matching and really make a meal of it?

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