Introducing Two Wealthy Young Celebrities You Will Soon Hate

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Dear Harry and Peter Brant,

Hey, you crunchy pale husks of wasted indulgence. Cut it out. Everywhere I look lately, there you are, kissing your mom on ABC News, smelling one another in the New York Times or spilling your life stories like a flavorless jelly across three pages of Vanity Fair. You are somehow both young and feeble all at the same time, like brittle children who belong in a bubble. You are the next pair of celebrity heirs in a long line of Paris Hiltons, Brandon Davises and Kardashians, becoming famous just for existing, and I am torn between feeling bad for you and wanting to knock you down in the wet grass of your father's polo fields.

NYT Proves Brant Brothers Are New York's Most Fabulous Teenagers by Samantha Randazol 11:49 amt. Jume 21st. 2012
Styleite

I hope you get grass stains on your little white blouses.

On one hand, you are just kids, a 15- and 18-year-old still treading the waters of self-discovery while the world watches and documents your clumsiness. But on the other, limper, gold-adorned hand, you are spoiled, listless dilettantes who brag about how many waistcoats are in your closet. You pose for pictures at fashion events while wearing world-weary faces and you tweet about how tired you are of the Hamptons. You're just generally awful, and you're ruining rich for the rest of us.

And now that you've polished your personas enough with the help of your PR team that you're hoping we pay attention to your every move, your personal life is forfeit. It belongs to us now, the general public, and like everyone else who stumbled across one of your softball interviews, I have some notes. A lot of what I'm about to tell you is going to sound intentionally cruel, and I assure you that most of it absolutely is. But there's also some genuine advice in here. You're only kids, after all, and I suspect you don't have anyone in your life who is watching all the weird, ostentatious things you do and is willing to say, "Hey, maybe knock that shit off."

Introducing Two Wealthy Young Celebrities You Will Soon Hate

Yes to whatever you're both doing with your hands there. That screams self-assurance.

For starters, where on earth are your parents? It seems unfair to call you the offspring of a famously wealthy couple when you are more accurately the sheddings of a fiscally motivated hump. Two humps, actually. Your father is thick-eyebrowed millionaire Peter M. Brant, and your mother is Stephanie Seymour, a supermodel who is 21 years his junior. Where are those people whose natural instinct should be to protect you from your own arrogant stupidity? That's not to say that you are abnormally stupid. You're only teenagers, and you're eager to show the world how you solved being alive. The problem is that you have no one around to tell you how wrong you are. For instance, in the interview with the New York Times, you were asked about your interests, and you said:

Peter: I'm interested in 18th century furniture, late 19th century art, the Arts and Crafts movement and history of the mid- to late 19th century. I bounce around a lot, but I usually stick with the same three centuries.

Harry: I become obsessed with things like DNA or old Valentino shows or the Qing Dynasty. I have a love of opulence.

Right now, you're too young to understand why those answers are hopelessly stupid. The interviewer should have stopped you there and said, "Fuck you, give me a real answer." But he did not, and that's probably why he's relegated to fluff pieces like this in the fashion section, but more on that in a second.

Peter, you're not passionate about furniture. You're just not. You may have seen a footstool once you kind of liked, you may even have a catalog filled with furniture that you force yourself to memorize with a flashlight under your 2,000-thread-count bed sheets every night in the hopes that a pretend niche fascination will make you seem more interesting, but you do not love furniture.

And Harry, I'm willing to believe that you are curious about DNA or the Qing Dynasty and that those aren't just words you overheard in school, but I don't think you know the difference between "curious" and "obsessed." In fact, I'm willing to bet that every sentence that limps its way out of your mouth is supported by superlatives you don't quite understand. You think building aggressive, baseless opinions is the same thing as building character, partially because you're just 15 years old, and partially because you're probably surrounded by other people doing the exact same thing, since your third interest, of course, is fashion.

Introducing Two Wealthy Young Celebrities You Will Soon Hate
Getty

Somewhere there is a very chilly chimpanzee with scoliosis.

Both of you have made it painfully clear that you're "obsessed" with and "addicted" to fashion, and while I realize that appreciations of the aesthetic are subjective and that fashion can technically qualify as art, I want you both to know that your hobby is dumb. You have a dumb hobby full of dumb people who have dumbly sacrificed everything of real value in their lives on the altars of decadence.

In your interview with Vanity Fair, it says:

And then there was the disappointment of not getting to attend the Met Ball (there had been "complications" with the invitations, Peter said), at which they had planned to arrive in a gold-plated Rolls-Royce accompanied by a baby panther wearing a diamond necklace.

"I had arranged for the baby panther and everything," Peter complained. "What could be better than diamonds and exotic baby animals?"

"You're nobody until PETA either loves you or hates you," Harry observed.

Most people with money realize the tremendous power they have to affect the world, even if it's for the worse. They want to lead expeditions up mountains, travel the world or have people killed. Not you -- you want to wear tiny jackets and leather chaps in the hopes that someone mistakes you for being interesting.

Introducing Two Wealthy Young Celebrities You Will Soon Hate
Billy Farrell Agency

To be fair, Harry, having a head so heavy that you can't hold it upright in any of your pictures is genuinely fascinating.

Offered limitless open doors, you chose a walk-in closet. You embraced the one aspect of affluence that makes you both loathsome and completely inconsequential, like a farce of wealth. Well, someone is already doing that bit, you porcelain assholes. Get your own thing.

Your entire existence, everything you have chosen to be, is so big and means so little. And don't try to argue that you're just being yourselves, despite the critics. The world is curious about rich people, but it's not stupid. What you're doing is clearly practiced, intentional, and still you're not very good at it. Your personalities are built entirely on some CW show you saw once and have since been unable to shake. A lack of actual responsibilities or needs in your life afford you all the time you need to just sit and invent yourselves from scratch, from the crack of noon until you fall asleep in each other's arms on the 18th century couch in one of your family's many living rooms. "We need to be that," you likely whisper to one another in between kisses, pointing at the flickering flat screen. "We need to become gossip girls."

Introducing Two Wealthy Young Celebrities You Will Soon Hate

Yaaaaay!

The only guidance I can offer you is to stop. Stop everything you're doing. Stop doing interviews, stop tweeting to your fans, stop talking about how Suri Cruise is your idol. If you decide, in a few years, after you've gained some perspective, that you want to go back to it all, then that's fine. Some people really are just bland, pretentious wastes of space by nature. But I think you'll most likely be embarrassed by it all. I think you will look back and think, "Oh God, what was I doing? Who let me stumble around in public as an oblivious parody of elitism for so long?" Well, the answer won't be me. You're awful, and I just wanted to be one of the first to tell you.

XOXO, Soren

You can follow Soren's own bids for attention on Twitter or his exhaustive furniture appreciation blog on Tumblr.

For more from Soren, check out Dear Hotmail: What the Hell Happened to You? and Pitching Movies to Katherine Heigl: Harder Than It Looks.

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