dresses). During the era when the Going-Out Top reigned
supreme, she had a beauty line and half a dozen fragrances and
hosted a couple of talk shows. She threw the best parties at Cipri-
ani Downtown with stacked guest lists and giant ice sculptures.
Aoki excuses herself to go to the bathroom. If Ming touches her
dessert, she will end her life, Aoki threatens as she leaves.
“I’m not going to touch her dessert,” Ming snaps back, and
shows me her favorite picture of her mother, taken backstage at a
Baby Phat show in 2002.
“ ‘I will end your life,’ she said,” Simmons repeats, and laughs to
herself. “She said, ‘I won’t touch it.’ She said, ‘I will end your life.’
That’s my Aoki.”
Simmons waves down a passing waitress to order Aoki another
dessert to preemptively avoid an act
of sororicide, even though Ming
hasn’t touched her sister’s parfait.
The waitress, frazzled by the number
of requests coming from the table in
English, misunderstands somethin
about the order.
“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, atVanity 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.”
That profile, by Nancy Jo Sales, came out in 2005 when Kimora
and Russell Simmons were a power couple, before their very public
divorce was finalized in 2009. Her life then involved fielding good-
luck phone calls from Hillary Clinton before fashion shows. She
slept on a bed purchased from Sotheby’s Gianni Versace estate
sale for $200,000 in a ten-bedroom, 11-bathroom, $23.9 mil-
lion house decorated in gold with gold accents. There were
solid-jade toilets in every bathroom, recalls formerVogue
writer-at-large André Leon Talley. Once, she asked him what
color Bentley to buy. He suggested navy or maroon, like the
“queen of England.” Whereupon she declared, “I’m young.
I don’t want to have a car like the queen,” and instead got a plati-
num-gray model with custom mink carpet. She wrote a book,
Fabulosity: What It Is & How to Get It(part chatty memoir, part
her version ofThe Artist’s Way), which broke down the five key
tenets of fabulosity: confidence, uniqueness, independence, luxury,
and generosity. She starred in a reality show,Life in the Fab Lane,
the trailer for which included footage of “Boss Kimora” making
men cry and ended with a 30-second supercut of her saying varia-
tions on “Can we make this more about me?”
But now things might be a little more about the next genera-
tion. Her daughters have long been part of the Brand of Kimora,
appearing by her side on the runway and in Baby Phat ads to
reinforce her image as mother-mogul-model. This time around,
they’re helping her with business decisions—after all, she needs
to target their generation more than hers—and are functionally
the faces of the brand. For the backdrop of the first set of official
Baby Phat campaign photos, Aoki and Ming rented a dilapidated
mansion in upstate New York and a blue Lamborghini. Aoki wore
thigh-high boots and no pants; Ming posed on all fours with a cat
on her back. Simmons does not like how sexy her daughters
looked. “Don’t show me that,” she says as Ming hands me the
phone to look at outtakes.For the Forever 21 shoot, a roller-disco concept, Aoki and Ming
gathered their friends and people they admire from social media,
including Charli Howard, a “mid-size body-confidence activist,”
and D’Lila and Jessie Combs, P. Diddy’s twin daughters. Sim-
mons, who posed alongside her daughters in short-shorts, calls it
the “legacies” shoot, a nod to the hip-hop spawn who are grabbing
the torch from her hand.
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. (Sim-
mons proudly announced her daughter’s college acceptance on
Instagram, writing, “She really did it on her own merit and
we’re really so proud because Aoki can’t row or anything like
that,” which was seen as a dig at the
actresses embroiled in the Varsity Bluesscandal.) 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.
Aoki peppers her conversation and her social media with inspi-
rational quotes and historical and literary references, and she pre-
fers captions that alert people to her civic engagement and activ-
ism. Ming prefers selfies showcasing her glossy pout, long lashes,
and outfits. Her bio reads, “(insert whatever inspirational quote
my sister has in bio).”AUGUST SEPTEMBER , THE CUT 63Simmons
personi ied the
promise of upward
mobility through
purchasing power.
Simmons, age 15,
posing in Paris
in a leather
Chanel suit by
Karl Lagerfeld.PHOTOGRAPH: NORA FELLER/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES