Red is the limited edition of the archetypes: three women out of twenty-eight, and a colour that behaves like no other. It turns copper by a window, nearly brown under a lamp and properly red the moment a taxi door opens beneath a streetlight. Photographers call it difficult. We call it the most interesting shade in print.
The three who wear it are just as hard to pin down: one petite and romantic, one bold and curvy, one slim and bookish, spanning the first half of the twenties and the second.
Luna has the deepest red, a dark auburn that flares copper under restaurant lights, on a curvy 171 cm frame with warm brown eyes. Lea wears long, loose auburn waves with hazel eyes and a petite 161 cm build. Patricia has the gentlest of the three, an auburn brown cut in soft layers, slim at 172 cm with kind brown eyes and, more often than not, a novel tucked into her bag.
Luna lives in Mayfair and keeps her favourite night close to home: Peking duck in the lacquered Art Deco room of China Tang beneath The Dorchester, then a nightcap before a very short walk. Lea begins among the antique dealers of Mount Street, then inspects the upholstery at the Colony Grill Room in The Beaumont with open delight. Patricia starts among the art books at Maison Assouline on Piccadilly and, if the Royal Academy has a late opening, crosses the road to it.
All three make things. Luna shoots faces and neon on an old manual camera, Lea throws cups at a ceramics studio and can date a cornice at a glance, and Patricia paints small watercolours of rooftops and rain. That makes them wonderful company for any evening with a visual thread: a private view, a design shop, a hotel lobby worth studying slowly. They notice colour everywhere, including the colour of your tie.
Red is the colour cameras most often get wrong, pushing it towards orange in one frame and towards brown in the next. So every portrait of these three was held up against the woman herself before it went into the issue, and the shade on her profile is the shade that will walk through your door. Like every image in the issue, these are glamour and lifestyle portraits with softened faces; nothing is nude and nothing is lifted from elsewhere.
Autumn is the obvious season for this archetype, when the plane trees around Grosvenor Square turn the colour of Luna's hair and the first fires are lit in the hotel bars. But red works in every season: against winter tweed, beside summer linen, under the pale spring light of a Mayfair mews.
Patricia is filed under statuesque and under slim and slender as well; Lea turns up among the petite covers and Luna among the curvaceous. In the age chapters, Lea and Luna are both in early twenties, while Patricia is in the late twenties.
With only three names on the page, diaries fill quickly, so a day's notice helps. The first hour is £400, and a launch, a gallery opening or a charity evening, the territory of the society pages, suits these three beautifully. Longer bookings are priced line by line on the rates page; send Bella the name you would like first and a second choice, just in case.
Mention a favourite or describe the mood of the evening. Bella comes back with who is free, the fee and an arrival time.
