imora 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 gen-
tleman sipping a beautiful drink in a crystal glass. He gives a smile
and a nod of recognition; she returns the nod in kind.
Simmons, the onetime model and onetime mogul, loves it here.
She has spent stretches of the summer in Paris since she was 13,
when she was plucked from a modeling school in a St. Louis mall,
signed to an exclusive Chanel contract, and selected to wear the
coveted last look in Karl Lagerfeld’s 1989 haute couture show: a
wedding gown for the fashion industry’s child bride. Success and
money led to frequent stays at the Plaza Athénée like a barely
adult Eloise. She threw her children’s birthday parties here. (Once,
there was a Marie Antoinette theme.) She spent time here with
her ex-husband, Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons, whom
she met when she was 17 and he was 35.
Now, at 44, Simmons rents an apartment just around the corner
but comes to the Plaza Athénée lobby several times a week, talking
for hours and ordering snacks for her four children, three of whom
are here today—Aoki Lee, 17; Ming Lee, 19; and Kenzo Lee, 10.
(Her 4-year-old is at home napping.) Here, everything you touch
is of lush velvet, the sounds are of spindly heels tapping on a mar-
ble floor and a harp playing, the smells are of the most delicate
florals, and the tastes are of fresh white truffle sprinkled on pasta.
Does she know the man across the lobby? “Not really,” Simmons
says. They’ve never talked. But they are both often here, sitting in
the lobby, having snacks, she explains out of the side of her frozen
smile, lips barely moving, as if she were her own ventriloquist. He’s
probably someone important because everyone here is somebody.
“He’s probably like the king of Zimbaaaabwe or something!”
There’s no king of Zimbabwe. There’s a president. It is not that
man. But sure. In the flashy, bedazzled dimension Simmons cre-
ated 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.
The unapologetic consumerism of the early-aughts hip-hop
fashion scene can be summarized in the image of a six-foot-one
Simmons walking down the Baby Phat runway in a precariously
low-cut white jumpsuit, Ring Pop–size diamonds on her fingers
and ears. She was the loud-voiced, big-egoed high priestess of a
particularly campy version of bling. Baby Phat, the clothing
62 THE CUT AUGUST SEPTEMBER ,
brand Simmons ran from 1999 to 2010, was a billion-dollar
company built on the lifestyle she embodied. The popularity of
the brand—which started with bedazzled-logo baby tees the
Simmonses passed out to model and musician friends like Lil’
Kim, Naomi Campbell, and Christy Turlington—helped turn
streetwear into a movement. Baby Phat brought the attitude and
style of hip-hop to the mainstream. It meant a lot to people,
especially to female fans of streetwear, who hadn’t had a line to
call their own, really, before that. Baby Phat didn’t dismiss their
desire for more, and Simmons personified the promise of
upward mobility through purchasing power.
In several weeks, Simmons is relaunching Baby Phat. She
announced it in March, on International Women’s Day; she tells
me she’s leaning into her legacy as a “woman of color in a cre-
ative ownership position.” She wants to collect on some of the
credit she feels she’s owed for the work she did for the culture.
In some ways, her timing is good. There’s rampant early-aughts
nostalgia, with a definite soft spot for Baby Phat and Simmons
in particular. (The vintage purveyor and fashion historian
Gabriel Held reports selling his entire archive of the brand to
Rihanna last year.) If Paris Hilton would have worn it to pose
vacant-eyed in front of a party photographer at Bungalow 8, a
designer is bringing it back in 2019. But then again, Baby Phat
is being reborn into a world still reeling from a recession while
anticipating another, a world that has reckoned with the ugly
sides of celebrity and consumption and inequality.
In June, Simmons surprise-dropped a Baby Phat x Forever
21 collaboration as a sort of pilot program. The clothing was
on-trend—cropped tees, spandex miniskirts, and leopard-print
bike shorts to be worn under huge T-shirts or with matching
tube tops. But they all had the Baby Phat logo, that delicate
line-drawn cat image based on Simmons’s own pet Siamese,
Max. The collection sold out in a day.
Simmons perks up and straightens her shoulders as an attrac-
tive, 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.
“Today I walked all over the city,” she says to Julien, who is
kneeling next to her chair, rapt. “I took the train. I feel very French,
française. I’ve got on flat shoes”—she gestures to her pearl-
bedecked Prada slides, which have slid halfway off to reveal the
fading butterfly tattoo on her right foot. She’s dressed to match
her lifestyle à la française, in red pedal pushers, a simple white
silk button-down, and only one large canary-diamond ring.
We were all supposed to meet an hour earlier, at the Musée
d’Orsay, where an exhibition called “Black Models: From Géricault
to Matisse” was in its last days, focusing on overlooked and anony-
mous figures who appeared in artworks from 1758 to 1956. She’d
been excited to walk through the show with me and her children
and discuss the legacy of other models of color. (Simmons is of
Japanese-Korean and black ancestry.) “I wanted to talk about all
the old girls,” she said. “Not like I was one of them, but I can appre-
ciate it.” But the Métro she was on broke down and she was stuck
in an unair-conditioned car. The hotel was nicer.
Simmons is the first to admit that her modeling career, which
tapered off at 21, did not have the same longevity as that of “the
old girls,” though she’s talking more about Naomi Campbell.
Instead, there were marriages. Kids. Baby Phat, of course, which
was a spinoff of Phat Farm, the preppy take on streetwear her
then-husband had founded in 1992. And there were also her more
expensive lines: Kouture by Kimora and the KLS collection of
high-end sportswear (think $1,000 tropical-colored sheath