I Wish I Was Invited To... Stephanie Seymour's Hen Do Where '90s Supermodels Danced With Strippers
Welcome to our new series I Wish I Was Invited To…, in which British Vogue revisits the parties lost to time, snapshots from a pre-social media era, long before the malign rule of the Instagram flower arch.
In 2004, Hamish Bowles trailed Stephanie Seymour during the spring/summer collections at New York Fashion Week. He visited the supermodel-turned-society siren’s East Village pied-à-terre – home to a small museum’s worth of art (Warhol, Basquiat, Sherman, Koons) and mid-century furnishings (Prouvé, Perriand, Mouille, Royère) – and watched as she swelled the coffers of Bergdorf Goodman before clinking champagne flutes with Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and Michael Kors at the shows. “We used to be so wild backstage!” she said at one point, observing with disbelief the subdued scene at Zac Posen, and referred to the bare-faced models at Narciso Rodriguez as “droids”. Fair enough: Stephanie belonged to a crop of rockstar models whose larger-than-life personalities lit up the runways and the imaginations of pop culture at large.
Karen Mulder, Naomi Campbell and Janice Dickinson.
Getty ImagesFew things capture their essence quite as vividly as the images taken on Stephanie’s hen night, held at the Barfly restaurant in Paris five days before her wedding to the newsprint tycoon, polo player and art collector Peter Brant in 1995. She was 26, he was 48. A time since lost to Instagram flower arches and – let’s face it – “wellness”, the scenes from that evening would be splashed across today’s front covers: Helena Christensen wielding an inflatable penis in one hand and a Piña Colada in the other; Kate Moss puffing on Marlboro Golds; Naomi Campbell and Kristen McMenamy dancing atop the dinner tables (the latter standing barefoot in a platter of grease); Claudia Schiffer’s sister Ann dousing the fashion elite with silly string; Janice Dickinson receiving a lap dance from a man who, at first glance, could be mistaken for John Galliano; and the bride-to-be locking lips with Jack Nicholson.
Kate Moss and Helena Christensen.
Getty ImagesThese glamazonian party girls had reigned at the top of fashion’s food chain for more than a decade, dictating which photographers, stylists and designers were worth their patronage and raking in millions of pounds in the process. But this was perhaps the last gasp of the (true) supermodel era. In the years that followed Stephanie’s bachelorette, movie stars who had previously kept their distance from the fashion world started to book advertising campaigns and magazine covers, while the industry’s beauty ideal swung towards a more androgynous, waifish look better suited to the minimalism and grunge rising from the catwalks. Stephanie (much like Helena, Kristen and Claudia) eventually traded in modelling for motherhood. And though hers appeared to be a fairytale marriage – an Alaïa gown, four children and houses in Connecticut, the Hamptons and Palm Beach – it came to an unfortunate end when the model filed for divorce in 2009. At least she – and we – will always have Paris.
