By Style10 windows
Slim and slender: ten companions, known by the first thing they order
Ten companions carry a slim or slender build on their profiles. The shortest of them is Lucy, 163 cm, and the tallest Violetta, 178 cm. A build says very little about how an evening will go. The first order at the counter says a great deal more, so that is how this window is arranged: by the thing each one asks for before anything else.
Read it as a menu of temperaments. Tea drinkers tend to like a slow afternoon, coffee drinkers a plan that moves, and the ones who head straight for a table have usually decided the evening already.
Slim and slender, lit
10 women in the windows fit this description, going by the facts on their profiles. Each pane leads to the full picture.
Cindy
Age 26Chelsea
Karolina
Age 27Covent Garden
Liana
Age 28Marylebone
Lucy
Age 24Pimlico
Margo
Age 31Knightsbridge
Patricia
Age 28Belgravia
Samanta
Age 27Mayfair
Stacy
Age 22Chelsea
Vanessa
Age 25Paddington
Violetta
Age 30Belgravia
Tea, poured slowly
Cindy orders a pot on the terrace by the boating lake in Regent's Park after rowing you round it, and keeps to daylight hours. Long fair waves, blue eyes, and a yoga mat never far from her diary. Patricia takes hers in the glass covered courtyard of the Wallace Collection, having spent an hour among the old masters first. She collects secondhand books and old thrillers, and will not tell you how any of them end.
Coffee, then onwards
Lucy drinks two espressos standing up in Fitzrovia and is out of the door before the cups are cold, heading for a gallery window or the park. Vanessa orders coffee after an hour among the shelves at Daunt Books, asks where you grew up and remembers the answer at dinner; she cycles, collects languages and knows her perfumes. Violetta has hers in the café at Foyles, a novel already chosen for you on the table between the cups, and a stand-up night pencilled in for later if you are game.
A glass once the show is over
Samanta asks for a martini so cold it hurts after the Duke's Hall concert at the Academy on Marylebone Road, then talks through what you both heard. She plays the violin herself and likes the dinner plan fixed by three in the afternoon. Stacy takes whatever the bar is pouring on a crowded Dean Street pavement after the late comedy, and argues about which joke will last. At 176 cm she is the tallest of the ten after Violetta, and the one most likely to accept a booking made that same evening.
Supper, already decided
Liana goes for steak at Le Relais de Venise, which has never bothered with a menu, after an early walk through the rose beds in the park. Karolina books a light supper near Wigmore Street so that nothing runs late before the recital. Margo wants a candlelit table in Marylebone after an afternoon at the Lisson Gallery, and plenty of friendly disagreement about the art.
Put your own order in the message
It sounds like a small thing, but a line about your own first order helps. Tell Clementine you are a flat white person, or that the evening should start with something dry and very cold, and she will lean towards the companion who orders the same. Two people who like the same first hour usually like the rest of the evening too.
The order is only the start
Whatever arrives first, the evening is booked on the one ladder: ninety minutes at £400, two hours at £500, and four hours at £900 once dinner is part of it, the format described under dinner dates. Six of the ten also stand among the statuesque, Lucy is in petite, while Margo and Violetta also belong to thirties and beyond.
Light a window
Point to a pane on this page, or describe the look and let the desk suggest a name.