In Our Future
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When Natalia Bryant was very young, her parents, Kobe and Vanessa Bryant, didn’t tell her bedtime stories when they tucked her in at night. She was the one doing the storytelling.
“My parents would ask me, ‘Do you have a story?’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, okay! There was this princess…’ ” She says this over lunch in downtown L.A., gently futzing with the sleeves of her navy cashmere crewneck from the Row. (Like most of the pieces she favors from her closet and jewelry box, it was handed down from her mom.) If you wanted to, you could draw a straight line from that toddler being taught by her parents that her imagination was as important as theirs to the 21-year-old sitting here, currently enrolled at the University of Southern California’s film school, hard at work pursuing the dream of telling stories on a much larger scale. “I’ve always loved world-building,” she says.
For third year USC filmmaking students, the junior thesis tends to consume most of their attention, but Bryant has been known to take the odd day or two off—to, say, throw out the first pitch at Dodger Stadium in her father’s honor on Lakers Night, or to pose for a Bulgari campaign with her mother. “One day she texted the group chat saying, like, ‘I have the best news,’ ” her friend and classmate Alysha Wang tells me. “And I was like, ‘Okay, you can text the group chat.’ But she didn’t want to text the group chat. She waited until we were all together in the lab at school, and she was like, ‘Guys: I’m going to walk in Milan Fashion Week!’ ”
Such are the kinds of extracurriculars required of the modern multihyphenate. “Natalia has always been able to accomplish anything she sets her mind to,” Vanessa says of her daughter. “Whether she’s at home with us, with her friends, at work, or at school, Natalia always stays present and passionate in the face of any challenge. I’m so proud of everything she’s achieved and impressed by the kind, smart, and beautiful young woman I’ve seen her become.”
This evolution—from girl growing up in Newport Beach to young adult with a camera in her hand—dovetails with her interests as a director, which she defines for me as “girlhood and coming-of-age stories,” inspired by the work of directors like Sofia Coppola and Greta Gerwig. (Coppola, with her famous last name and unapologetically feminine aesthetic, may be a particularly instructive comparison.) And what began with creating her own bedtime stories has developed into building out the nitty-gritty details of the five-and-a-half-minute narrative short film she’s finishing up for her junior thesis when we meet.
Her film follows a pair of fictional sisters navigating a school graduation with absentee parents. She wanted to write about the unique bond between sisters, she says; the less than ideal parents were added to help the narrative—but please don’t read into it. “I told my mom, ‘It’s not about you guys, I swear!’ ” she says. But that conversation did lead to a longer talk, about how glad she was to have parents who always showed up for her. “I got to thank her for being such a supportive parent.” She can’t thank both of them, because her father and her younger sister Gianna were tragically killed in a helicopter accident four years ago, in an event that blew a hole in the world of basketball and rocked the city of Los Angeles. Natalia is understandably guarded about this aspect of her life, though when speaking about Gianna, who was 13 when she died, she still sometimes slips into the present tense.
Is it hard to be a 21-year-old girl (never easy) who lives in L.A. (also not without challenges), where her beloved father, one of the most legendary Lakers ever, was practically royalty, and nearly every part of the city features street art memorializing him and her sister? “Honestly, no,” she says. “I love seeing the murals. Whenever I see them when I’m driving around, I’m like, ‘Oh, okay.’ They feel like special gems.”
The legacy left behind by her lost family members does weigh on her, though not in an oppressive way, she says. It’s a weight she appreciates, like a mantle. She breaks it down for me: “In terms of legacy, my main goal is just to be the best version of me that I possibly can,” she says, which means keeping an open mind, as well as channeling Kobe’s famous work ethic and inexhaustible drive. Also, “understanding that there’s no expectation that I should have for each stage of life. I just need to know that I have to keep learning, because there’s no finish line. You just have to keep pushing and being the best person you can be and soaking everything up like a sponge… The job’s never done.”
Whatever she’s doing, it’s working, her USC classmates say. Her reputation at school is that she’s friendly, low-key, and passionate about learning how movies are made. Kayla Wong, the third member of the trio working on Bryant’s film class project, says, “She has this positive energy and light that she brings to everything she does.” Even when a last minute hard drive meltdown seemed to mean they’d lost all their work last semester, Natalia kept her cool, Wang tells me. “She was like, ‘It’s going to be fine,’ ” Wang says. “I expected her to panic a lot more than me, but she was the one calming me down.” (They recovered the footage.)
Something common to Bryant’s interests is a fearless embrace of the unknown. Take, for example, modeling. The job has never been her primary focus, she says, but it has been fun—most of the time. Stepping out onto her first Versace runway last September was unexpectedly challenging. “I was completely terrified,” she says cheerfully, although you wouldn’t know it from a video she made for Vogue in which she walked around backstage soliciting advice from fellow catwalkers Gigi Hadid and Amelia Gray Hamlin before the show. The adrenaline rush came soon afterward, its own reward. “I remember after I walked I turned to someone and said, ‘Oh my god, let’s do that again!’ ” It looks as though she won’t have to wait long for another chance. Piergiorgio Del Moro and Samuel E. Scheinman, the casting agents who selected Natalia for the Versace show, have been keeping an eye on her since she first signed with IMG. The review: “She shone on the runway,” they tell T&C.
She knows about shine. Last summer she interned for Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment and lent a hand to creating the imagery that went into the Renaissance tour. “It was such an amazing experience,” she says. “You can just talk to anybody in the office, and they’re amazing.” (As with most Beyoncé-related endeavors, which are held more tightly than some state secrets, exactly how and what Natalia did behind the scenes will remain there.) It was thrilling to be on the team of someone she has idolized since she and her mom used to drive around blasting Destiny’s Child. Vanessa likes to test her musical knowledge, Natalia says. She’ll play a few bars of an aughts classic and ask her to name that tune. “I’m horrible with lyrics. Like, horrible,” Natalia says. “She’ll play the song, and it’s a throwback, and I’m like, ‘Mom, I swear I know this song! I swear I’m cultured! You raised me right!’ ” Her parents’ musical influence on her was about equal, she says. Vanessa would play Gwen Stefani, Fergie, Shakira, Beyoncé, Guns N’ Roses, Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac, Tupac. “I got to experience that. And my dad would play a lot of Jay-Z, a lot of Biggie Smalls.” She got both sides, is what she’s saying, and she downloaded the music videos to pore over on her tablet, falling in love with the way artists told their stories. “I listened to movie soundtracks in my dad’s car, and now I have a playlist of all my favorite movie scores I listen to.” She has just commissioned her own score for the first time; she plans to listen to it with its composer, another classmate and friend, right after our interview.
“I think it’s fun to have my foot in both worlds,” fashion and film, she says. “They’re both collaborative, and you meet so many different people.” She likes to be the bridge, she says, connecting her friends from different parts of her quickly expanding life. “It makes the world feel smaller.” The appeal of modeling for Natalia is the team sport aspect, the fun of being on set with a group of disparate creative people coming together to tell a story. “What I’ve always loved about film is that it’s such a collaborative art form,” she says, “and I view modeling the same way.”
She likes picking people’s brains, understanding how they got where they are. “Even when [photographers] are taking pictures and they’re about to switch a lens, it’s like, ‘Okay, why are you switching to that lens?’ They’ll explain it to you.” It might sound rudimentary, this interest in what’s going on in front of you, but there are plenty of photo shoots where models are seen rather than heard, and never listen to anyone lower than themselves on the call sheet. In Bryant’s experience, she says, “there’s not one person that doesn’t like explaining what they love.” It’s another way she’s blending her influences, molding her life into what she wants it to be, walking through the world with her eyes wide open, experiencing it all.
Photographs by Danny Kasirye
Styling by Rebecca Ramsey
Hair by Larry Sims for Flawless at Forward Artists. Makeup by Joanna Simkin for Makeup by Mario at the Wall Group. Nails by Miho Okawara for Mihonails Melty Gelato. Tailoring by Elma Click at SCD Inc. Production by ViewfindersLA
In the lead image: Natalia Bryant has appeared in a Bulgari campaign and on the Versace runway, but her current focus is finishing her degree at USC. Prada jacket ($3,650), shorts ($1,320), and belt ($650); Ana Khouri ear cuff and ring
This story appears in the February 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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