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SUPER STEPHANIE - Australian Vogue September 2001


She's bared her body for Victoria's Secret and Playboy, and a little more for Richard Avedon. Supermodel Stephanie Seymour talks about her rocky past with Axl Rose and the good life now


Stephanie Seymour is a grandmother, a model and now, with her small part in the upcoming film Pollock, an actress. She is a mother of eight (five of them stepchildren, hence the grandchild), and has been married twice, first to a musician called Thomas Andrews and now to polo-playing businessman Peter Brant. Between her marriages, she dated Warren Beatty and, more infamously, Axl Rose, lead singer of the rock band Guns n' Roses. As well as being the most famous model for Victoria's Secret, Seymour has posed for Playboy, speaks fluent French and has lived in Paris, Milan and California. Now she divides her time between Manhattan and Connecticut, where she and her husband have a farm and a stable of polo ponies.

I thought her story would be a series of lives and transformations. Stephanie Seymour, slippery eel: from California girl to Elite model and rock chick, from underwear model to model suburban polo wife. In fact, the story is more straightforward in some ways, and more complicated in others. Seymour, aged 33, explains her drive simply. “I just wonder what more I can do with my life”, she says, philosophically. An admirer of purity, she looks for clean lines and modernity in design, art and clothes. Likewise, she pauses before speaking and talks deliberately, not wasting a word in expressing herself. She is famous for her seductive, little-girl voice (men love it, of course) but, to me, she sounds sophisticated and a little European, and her words tinkle along like a bell, sounding certain without ever being hard. “I'm just trying to be a good mother and to continue to grow and learn”, she says.

Seymour wears Azzedine Alaïa almost every day, even if she is on her farm in Connecticut. “His clothes are works of art.” she says. “Yet they are feminine and wearable and sexy, and comfortable most of the time, though I care nothing for comfort.” She laughs when she says this but it is true that, in her approach to dressing, Seymour is more like a French woman from the 50s (one of her favorite periods in fashion) than a modern American girl. She is pulled together and perfectly turned out as matter of course. When you see photographs of the former underwear model (she gave it up because she found it boring and her son, Dylan, found it embarrassing) at a polo match, she looks perfectly at home. If Aerin Lauder looks good in something by Oscar de la Renta, you can bet that Seymour will be chicer wearing something more unusual.

Her marriage to a very rich (from a fortune primarily in newspaper paper-mills) and very dashing older man is important and defining, but she is much more than a trophy wife. At one time, she was known as the sublime, 16-year-old girlfriend of John Casablancas, the married head of her modelling agency, Elite. Then she had a stormy relationship with Axl Rose which ended up in court. She is neither defensive about, nor keen to elaborate on, her time with the Guns n' Roses singer, but she was not, she points out, a typical rock chick. She was a model and a young mother who happened to go out with a rock star. “It wasn't happy time”, she says. “But I had great fun with my friends and, because I was a single mother, I continued to work.”

Now she is known for her carefully chosen fashion shoots and as Mrs Peter Brant. “We met through mutual friends,” says Seymour. He lived in New York and I lived in California, and I'd see him when I came into town because we'd go to the same dinners. But he is very shy, and never talked to me. I was always madly in love with him, and used to cry after parties – I'm kind of dramatic that way. I'd tell my girlfriends that I'd never be happy unless Peter Brant gave me some attention. One day, he told me that his neck hurt. He let me give him a massage, and I knew then that he liked me.” They had their first son, Peter, in 1994 and second, Harry, followed in 1996. They were married in Paris in July 1995, and the bride, of course, wore Alaïa.

Brant is executive producer for Pollock, Seymour's first film (he also produced Basquiat). She plays artist Helen Frankenthaler in Ed Harris's intense and compelling film about he abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock an his artist wife, Lee Krasner. Seymour's role is tiny, but she is luminescent on screen. “I was happy with the small part they gave me,” she says. “I've been waiting patiently for the right opportunity to do some acting. I've been offered lots of things, but nothing was right. This was perfect. I like a lot of rehearsing, even when modelling. You have a lot of people staring at you in either job, and it takes a while before you can melt them away. After that, I find acting comes quite naturally.”

Seymour has been modelling since she was 15 years old, when she was the California finalist for Elite's Look of the Year contest. She is now rated as the eighth-richest model in the world, but she is also one of the few who has combined commercial success with more creative experimentation. She has been on the cover of Vogue, Playboy and Sports Illustrated, and she was with Victoria's Secret for 10 years. Yet the most famous photograph of her appeared neither in a magazine nor a catalogue. It is a powerful image by Richard Avedon, which takes up a page in his book, An Autobiography. In it, Seymour, at her most beautiful, is pulling up her skin-tight black nylon body stocking to reveal a perfect triangle of public hair.

“Avedon is such a character,” says Seymour. “He was teaching a photography course to some kids an I was the model for the fashion photography. I'd done covers with him before but never anything comes creative. After a while, he said to me, ‘You know, Stephanie, we've done this picture and that picture, but I have this idea to do another picture. I think that everybody feels so comfortable showing their breasts all the time, but no-one is showing their ... you know’, I said, ‘Okay, I understand what you’re saying’. And it made sense to me, from a female point of view. I said, ‘You’re right – what is there to be ashamed of? I'll do it.’ We did it in front of the whole class.”

The story of the photography illustrates an important point. When you look at the picture, you think all kinds of things about Seymour – most of them involving salacious fantasies about her body – but you forget that, for her, it was part of one day's work.

Seymour no longer has to earn her living, but she is keen to pursue her acting career and she will continue to model. “I still love it,” she says. “But only when I work with interesting people who have their own ideas and allow me to do what I want to do. I refuse to do boring pictures.” Her contract with Victoria's Secret involved many such photographs. “Thank God it's over,” she says. “I'd never had one bad day with them, but it was boring work. Still, it was a means to an end – I have built up a great art collection.” One of the most recent additions to that collection, which includes works by famous artists Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Damien Hirst, is Jeff Koons's giant flower Puppy. It now lives with the Brants and other animals on their farm in Connecticut.

The spring, Seymour and her family will spend a week replanting Puppy with flowers. Her New Year's resolution is to start to take regular exercise (her body is a product of good genes rather than hard work). “But that is as much as I can say about the future. I talk about things after I've done them, not before,” she says. She pauses and, as if reminding herself, she says: “I don't want to jinx anything.”