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.
Few 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 tha.