Plate Accompli

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Marko Metzinger for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

Bouvier pattern, top, and zebras

IN COLLABORATION with Lenox, American textile house Scalamandré is putting five of its most iconic fabric patterns on china. The collection, which just debuted at Bloomingdale's, is dinnerware with a pedigree—and a back story that can help you avoid awkward silences at the table. The Bouvier pattern (top, 9-inch accent plate for $40) began life as wallpaper in the Washington home of Averell and Marie Harriman to which Jacqueline Kennedy retreated after her husband's 1963 assassination. Jackie had Scalamandré recreate the soothing floral as fabric when she moved to a Manhattan residence, and Pat Nixon later co-opted Bouvier to cover White House furniture. "It really is a pattern with political provenance," said Steven Stolman, president of Scalamandré. The collection also includes Zebras (bottom, 8-inch salad plate for $32), a famous motif unleashed in the '40s as wallpaper for legendary New York restaurant (and Frank Sinatra haunt) Gino's, an insistently old-school legend that closed in 2010. Mr. Stolman loves Zebra's stripy zest: "It's swank, but not stuffy."

A version of this article appeared January 26, 2013, on page D9 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Plate Accompli.