.OfficialKimora is relaunching Baby Phat, the early-aughts brand that helped turn streetwear into a movement. AllisonPDavis reports
Painting: Roberto Parada Kimora Lee Simmons spots someone at the table across from her. She’s at her usual haunt, sitting with legs crossed in a plush, poppy-colored armchair in the opulent lobby restaurant of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris. She makes eye contact with an older black gentleman sipping a beautiful drink in a crystal glass. He gives a smile and a nod of recognition; she returns the nod in kind.
There’s no king of Zimbabwe. There’s a president. It is not that man. But sure. In the flashy, bedazzled dimension Simmons created for herself long ago, there has always been a different sort of possibility. After all, a five-star Paris hotel where Elizabeth Taylor stayed is her kids’ Chuck E. Cheese’s.
Simmons perks up and straightens her shoulders as an attractive, dark-haired man comes over. “Oh, hi! Julien, no one will come see me. How have you been? I’m back,” she says. He’s the hotel’s concierge. Aoki excuses herself to go to the bathroom. If Ming touches her dessert, she will end her life, Aoki threatens as she leaves.
“Yeah. Don’t make me hit you in the knee,” Simmons says to the waitress’s departing back in a quiet, singsongy voice. She adds Splenda to her whipped cream and turns back to us. “I’m very aggressive … There was a thing years ago, you remember, at Vanity Fair? I said one time I’d beat a bitch’s ass, and she printed it on every page. And only now my kids have seen this article.”
Aoki is more interested in business strategy than design, though she’d like a preppy Baby Phat collection — blazers and skirts she could wear on campus this fall at Harvard. Aoki plans to be a senator and then president, she tells me. Ming, a sophomore at NYU, goes to the midtown office most days and is hands-on with the creative design. It was her idea to have an anorak, pants, and a miniskirt made out of reflective “anti-paparazzi” fabric that also looks really cool on Instagram.
But Kimora now is different from Kimora then. For one thing, people wonder if she’s still rich. She doesn’t like to go out, really, anymore. Fashion parties aren’t as fun now as when she was throwing them. In her new phase — one she’s calling either Fabulosity 2.0 or Fabulosity Reloaded, she hasn’t decided yet—she’s been paying attention to how everything’s different, wondering if she has changed enough or if things have changed too much.
So much of what Simmons did — the melding of fashion and celebrity and music, size inclusivity, diversity on the runway — has become common practice, though Simmons argues that brands are not genuine now in the way hers was. It’s also true that the newer streetwear lines have been elevated in a way Baby Phat wasn’t. Virgil Abloh’s brand, Off-White, is now considered high fashion and priced accordingly.
In 2004, Russell Simmons stepped away from Phat Fashions and sold it to Kellwood, a St. Louis–based apparel company, for $140 million. Kimora stayed on as creative director and president, expanding the brand into cosmetics, home décor, children’s clothing, shoes, and toys, but even that success couldn’t protect her from declining sales and CEOs who were unhappy with the astronomical costs of her shoots.
Simmons is called into a dressing room to start trying on clothes, when her third and current husband, 47-year-old Tim Leissner, FaceTimes her. She turns the phone so I can introduce myself to a blue-eyed German banker sporting a very dense beard. Eight years ago, they were seated next to each other in first class on a flight to Hong Kong. They had some friends in common, they discovered. They landed, went on a date, and the rest was marriage.
“Believe you me, I’ve been all up and down the wazoo checked. I’m not in that. Don’t just attack me because it’s just cute that day,” Simmons says, still talking to the invisible Post reporter who wronged her. “It’s like when people say to me, ‘Oh, you got this from Russell.’ I would say, ‘Working on my own, and quite successfully, when I met Russell.’ ”
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