Torso de force: polo-playing mogul Peter Brant has many trophies: wild animals, Warhols and Basquiats. Now, thanks to art world prankster Maurizio Cattelan, the biggest trophy of them all--Brant's wife, supermodel Stephanie Seymour--joins them on the wall.

W, December, 2003 by Belcove, Julie L.

It's a Sunday morning in Greenwich, Connecticut, in the early fall, and Stephanie Seymour is lying nude and motionless on her dining room floor. Or is she? It sure looks like Seymour, as her husband and several gawking visitors hover over her smooth, flawless body, contemplating her nature-defying breasts, her fine-boned face and her catatonic gaze--the kind peculiar to models on the runway. That this creature lacks legs, is made of wax and is swaddled in plastic wrap up to her neck does little to allay the eerie sensation that we are standing over a corpse. But then the flesh-and-bone Seymour comes gliding down the grand staircase, trilling her good mornings, her hair still damp from the shower, her feet bare.

The presence of the real thing alongside the...

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