“I feel like I’m in a bad episode of Gossip Girl,” Peter, the elder Brant brother, moans to contributing editor Nancy Jo Sales, holding up his iPhone to show her a picture from a recent charity ball. It was a very different picture, over a year ago, that had brought sudden Internet fame to the strikingly handsome 18-year-old son of former supermodel Stephanie Seymour and newsprint tycoon Peter Brant Sr., when paparazzi photos of him kissing his mother on a beach sparked gossip-blog interest and led him to post that he was gay. “I might be” gay, he now tells Sales. “I’m both, kind of, a little bit.... I do both, and, you know, I’m cool with everything. I don’t like to be defined. I personally don’t think that you can be. I’m undefinable. I’m undefined. And I think that anyone who thinks they have me figured out knows nothing about me, ’cause very few people in the world actually know anything about how my mind works.” He goes on to explain that “I think life is about making memories…. I want to be old and have so many things to remember, like, I just don’t know what to do with myself—like, I can talk about them for hours.”
“From now on when people ask me what I ‘do’ I’m just gonna say icon,” 15-year-old Harry wrote recently on the boys’ joint Twitter feed. On the other hand, Peter reassures Sales, “It’s not like we’re Suri Cruise.” Though he hasn’t met her, Peter says he’d like to. “She’s one of my idols,” he says. Both boys agree that Suri is something of a fashion guru. “And it’s all coming from her,” Harry remarks. “She’s always got some ’do. I love her hair.” “Clearly she’s just an awesome person,” Peter agrees. “And she always has some, like, sassy frog slippers.” Harry continues, “And, like, jammies in the restaurant.” Or as Peter remembers, “Didn’t she have some ladybug boots? I was like, I need those.” Harry knows the ones he means: “I have them in gray.”
There was, the boys tell Sales, one major disappointment to their spring social calendar: “complications” with their tickets to the annual Met Ball. “I had arranged for the baby panther and everything,” Peter complained. “What could be better than diamonds and exotic baby animals?” Sales reports that the boys had also cued up a gold-plated Rolls-Royce to deposit them and their baby panther on the red carpet. Indeed, Harry observes, “You’re nobody until peta either loves you or hates you.”
Because of their parents, the boys explain, fashion and art are a part of their everyday lives. “There’s just no way around it,” Harry says. “We wake up and see beauty everywhere. Both my parents bring such a unique element to it. They’ve both devoted their lives to beauty.” Though things went sour briefly in 2009 and 2010, during what became their parents’ highly publicized gossip-column divorce, the boys say their family life is better now. “We have lengthy dinner conversations,” Harry says. “It can be about anything—whether we went to a show, or an auction, or an option sale. It can be about gardening or fashion or magazines.” Peter chimes in, “We’re, like, a very aesthetic family.”
“We have so many adventures,” exclaims Harry, despite the Met Ball snafu. “We stayed at an island with Naomi [Campbell] not too long ago. It was like a private island,” in the Bahamas, Peter tells Sales. “We were all, like, on one of those little rafts in the bay. We were, like, lying around talking, and the rope that connected the raft to the beach got broken off.… And we just started drifting, but we didn’t notice. And then one of us got up to get water or something from, like, a cooler, and we were, like, Where are we? We had drifted way out into the ocean. We all started freaking out and, like, waving our arms.” They were towed back to shore eventually.
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