I spent an entire year going to estate sales every Saturday morning. My goal was to collect one hundred completely unique, vintage floral dinner plates for my reception. I negotiated with antique dealers and dug through dusty cardboard boxes in basements. By the end of the year, I had a gorgeous, curated stack of mismatched china sitting in my spare bedroom.
It looked absolutely incredible on the wooden farm tables. The photos belong in a magazine.
What the magazines do not show you is what happens at midnight after the caterers leave. If you rent standard white plates from a party company, the caterer just scrapes the food off, throws them in a plastic crate, and the rental company washes them the next day. If you bring your own thrifted vintage plates, the caterer leaves them stacked in heavy, sticky piles on your back porch.
Vintage china with gold rimming cannot go in a modern dishwasher. I spent my entire first morning as a married woman standing at my kitchen sink in sweatpants, hand-washing one hundred plates covered in dried prime rib gravy and hardened mashed potatoes.
If you are going to thrift your own table settings, you have to hire someone specifically to wash them before the night is over. Do not do it yourself, and do not expect your bridesmaids to do it. Pay a neighborhood teenager fifty dollars to stand at the sink, or just rent the boring white plates.