The thing nobody tells you is that most glassware chips or cracks within the first year, not from dropping it, but from stacking wet glasses while they're still warm from the dishwasher, or shoving them against each other in a cabinet that's one shelf too shallow. You'll lose a few. That's just the tax you pay for having nice things to drink out of, and it's still worth paying, because drinking orange juice out of a sturdy, decent glass instead of a jam jar changes your morning more than it should.
If you're starting from nothing, skip the delicate stuff first. Get a set of plain water glasses with a bit of weight to them, something that can go from the sink to the table to the dishwasher without you wincing, and a few mugs that are actually big enough for a full cup of coffee, not the dainty ones that hold what feels like three sips. Wine glasses and anything fragile can come later, once you know how often you actually host people and whether they're the kind of guests who set a glass down on a wood table without a coaster.
In an ordinary kitchen, glassware sits well against almost anything plain, open shelving, a basic wood table, a counter that's seen some use. It doesn't need to match your cabinets or coordinate with a theme. What it does need is to look like it belongs to actual humans, which mostly means having more than two of anything so you're not scrambling when company shows up.
Over time, clear glass holds up better than you'd expect if you hand wash the good pieces and let the dishwasher handle the everyday stuff. Tumblers get a little cloudy after a year or two of hard water, which a soak in vinegar fixes most of the way. Mugs stain from coffee and tea no matter what you do, and I've stopped fighting it. A pitcher earns its keep fastest in summer, and the handle is always the first thing to go if it's going to go, so check that before anything else when you're choosing one.
The one mistake to avoid is buying a full matching set of everything at once. You will break pieces unevenly, lose the exact replacement, and end up with a cabinet of mismatched survivors anyway, so you might as well start mismatched on purpose and save the money for the glasses you'll actually use every day.
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