For more than 40 years, Stephanie Seymour has relished being in front of a camera. She’s one of the inaugural ’90s-era supers, one of the rare models who appeared on both haute couture runways and Playboy covers, blazing a trail for others. Stephanie Seymour Net Worth
“The original baby woman” is how fellow supermodel Naomi Campbell refers to Seymour—who reportedly has a net worth of $100 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth—describing her ability to be both naïve and sensual, an all-American pinup and a high-fashion muse. Having worked with the biggest names in photography, including Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts, and Peter Lindbergh, Seymour has built her career by happily submitting to the gods of the photo shoot.
“It was almost a year in the making, this shoot,” Seymour says two weeks after the images were taken for WSJ. Her speech is fragile, and she’s wearing a white crochet dress with her silky brunette locks pulled back with a white bow. The reason for her hesitation to be in front of the camera again? In January 2021, her 24-year-old son, Harry Brant, a model and beloved fashion industry habitué died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in New York City. Suddenly the flashbulbs stopped.
Seymour, 54, married paper mill magnate and art collector Peter Brant in 1995. With his first wife, Sandra Brant, with whom he acquired Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in 1989, Brant had five children. Seymour had one son, Dylan, from her first marriage to Tommy Andrews. Together, Seymour and Brant had three more children: Peter Jr., Harry, and Lily. One of the blended family’s homes is a sprawling estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, which includes Jeff Koons’s Puppy sculpture from 1992 (a 40-foot, flower-covered West Highland terrier that sits at attention on their lawn), with the Brant Foundation’s art museum, and a polo field nearby.
For as far back as Seymour can remember, style was a love language for her two youngest sons, Petey, as he became known as a little boy, and Harry.
Here are a few things Stephanie Seymour revealed to WSJ. Magazine…
Seymour on Harry’s love of fashion:
“It was the cutest thing when they were in elementary school,” she says, telling a story about how Harry liked to volunteer to lay out outfits for her to wear to parent-teacher conferences. “I would say, ‘OK, you can choose my outfit,’ and then he would go through everything, the vintage, the everything, lay it all on the floor.” Once, he picked out a baby-blue vintage Christian Dior dress and matching baby-blue Manolo Blahnik pumps. “I’d say, ‘Harry, I can’t wear a vintage couture dress to a parent-teacher conference,’ ” Seymour recalls, “and he’d say, ‘Why not?’ ” Stephanie Seymour Net Worth
Seymour on the suit she wears during the shoot (one of Harry’s favorites):
“It’s a suit that I keep hanging in my dressing room, which is this big room where I keep all my stuff. I do my makeup there. I live in that room,” she says. “I looked at that suit one night and I said, ‘I’m going to put it on.’ It fit me.”
“It still feels so good to put his clothes on,” Seymour says. “I packed up these huge trunks with all his things, and I have this idea that I want to keep photographing his clothes because I think he would love it.” The brothers often socialized with top models who could have been younger versions of their mother. “He’s got this whole flock of women that would love to wear his clothes and be photographed,” she says. “That’s something I’m going to enjoy doing.”
Seymour on how her grandchildren have helped her heal:
“I try to just be present. For me with holidays, and I’m sure a lot of other people can relate, it’s difficult now because I’m always thinking of what’s missing,” she says. “But I’m really lucky. [We] have a lot of grandchildren. And there’s nothing that’s helped me get through all of this more than my grandchildren. And a lot of people say, ‘Well, they’re not your grandchildren. They’re Peter’s grandchildren.’ But they don’t feel that way, and neither do I. Nothing has given me more comfort than those kids calling me Grandma Stephanie.” Seymour’s eldest son, Dylan, had his first son in October. “He had a little boy,” Seymour says. “And they named him Harry.”
Naomi Campbell (Campbell is godmother to Seymour’s children with Peter Brandt) on Harry:
“I remember when he was 12, I’d take him to meetings and grown adults could not believe his mind and maturity,” Campbell says of Harry. “Steven Meisel loved him. Pat [McGrath] loved him. Everyone could see how special he was.”
Campbell on Seymour:
“We met in London on a Warehouse [shoot] with Christy [Turlington], and we’ve been glued together since that day in the summer of 1986,” says Campbell, who was the maid of honor at Seymour and Brant’s wedding and is godmother to all of her children with Brant. “She’s been the same for all the decades that I’ve known her. She’s smart, and when she’s passionate, she shows up.” Stephanie Seymour Net Worth
Seymour on her beginnings:
“I wanted to be a model since I was probably 5 years old.”
Seymour on Richard Avedon:
“I was nervous every single day I worked with Dick,” she says. “It was about creating a character so he could get what he wanted. I was relieved for this short period of time I didn’t have to be myself, and that made it so much easier. I couldn’t do those things, but this other girl could.”
Seymour on Alaïa designing her wedding dress:
“Should I say what he did to me at my wedding?” she asks. “I can do that now.” The day before her wedding outside of Paris in 1995, Seymour was booked to model in Chanel’s couture show, designed by the late Karl Lagerfeld. “That’s a show where you’re fitted in couture. Every little part of that dress is stitched on your body,” she says. “I went to Alaïa’s studio, and I told him I can’t come during the day tomorrow [for the final wedding dress fitting]. And he just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know if your dress will be ready’ in French. And I was like, ‘Really?’ ”
She realized Alaïa wanted her to cancel Lagerfeld. “He didn’t make me [cancel]; he didn’t have to say anything to me. I knew what he wanted,” she says. “It’s about your allegiance to someone you love.”
No longer booked with Lagerfeld, she showed up to Alaïa’s studio early to finish her dress. “He kept me on ice until about, I don’t know, 11 at night. And then he was ready to start working. But it was the greatest experience, as far as a fashion experience, I’ve had in my entire life. That will never change.”
Seymour on her massive vintage couture collection:
“I started collecting when it wasn’t worth very much, so it’s huge,” she says of the collection. One of her favorite pieces is a Christian Dior dress from the 1950s, which she wore to a Met Gala, honoring the house of Dior, in 1996. “I was the only person wearing a real Dior dress,” she says with a smile.
Does she have a favorite design from her collection? “I have too many dresses to even answer this question,” she says. But, in an emergency, which one would she take? “Whatever I could get my hands on,” she says. “I wouldn’t be too choosy, because my collection is really great.” Stephanie Seymour Net Worth
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Images: Dan Jackson for WSJ. Magazine
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