My mother would have laughed at the phrase 'table styling'. Not unkindly - she laughed at a lot of things - but at the idea that setting a table was a practice requiring advice, that it involved decisions beyond what needed to be on the surface for people to eat comfortably. In her kitchen in Peckham, the table was always ready because the table was always being used.
I have come to a different, or perhaps just more articulate, understanding of what a table communicates. The choices you make - deliberately or by default - tell people something about what kind of evening this is, how relaxed they are allowed to be, how much the host has thought about them specifically. A table set to impress is a different thing from a table set to welcome, and the difference is felt immediately.
The tablecloth question
Tablecloths went out of fashion, in the way that things go out of fashion - gradually and then suddenly, and for reasons that are only clear in retrospect. The reasons, in this case, were probably: the arrival of easy-clean surfaces, the casualisation of domestic entertaining, the association of formal table settings with a particular kind of aspiration that became unfashionable.
I have become a tablecloth person, which surprises me because I spent most of my twenties very much not being one. The thing that changed my mind was a meal at someone's house where the cloth was old, visibly linen, slightly imperfectly ironed in a way that felt honest rather than careless, and the effect was to make the table feel like a place rather than a surface. It said: this is set apart. We are doing something here.
You don't need an expensive tablecloth to achieve this. A length of fabric from a market, hemmed or unhemmed, works. The key qualities are weight and texture rather than price.
Mismatched glassware
The received wisdom about table settings has always required matching - matching glasses, matching plates, matching everything. The received wisdom is wrong, or at least it is not the only wisdom.
Mismatched glassware, assembled from charity shops, jumble sales, and the back of inherited cupboards, can create a table that looks more interesting and more individual than a matched set - with the important caveat that the mismatching needs to feel deliberate rather than apologetic. Different heights, different shapes, different levels of ornamentation: this is a table with a history. It has been added to over time. People have eaten and drunk here before you arrived.
The practical question is: what holds the table together when the glasses don't match? Usually it is the tablecloth, or a consistent candle type, or a very deliberate floral arrangement that anchors the eye. Something has to be the thread.
January
I think most about table-setting in January, which is probably the month when it matters most. January in London is dark by four, people are tired from the previous month, the temptation to simply order food and eat it on the sofa is very strong. The act of setting a table - lighting candles, putting flowers somewhere, using proper napkins - is a statement against all of this. It says: we are making an occasion. The occasion is Tuesday evening, but still.
My mother fed people the same way in January as in August. The season changed what she cooked; it didn't change the fact of cooking and setting a place. I understand now why that was not negligible. It was, in fact, everything.