FEATURES | Kimora Lee Simmons
One afternoon, I visited the KLS offices in midtown Manhattan
and took a tour of the line. Part of the collection was time travel,
accessing 2002 through iconic velour tracksuits and stretch-
denim jumpsuits. The rest is a mishmash of trends driving the
market: athleisurewear, miniskirts designed for colt legs, mesh
shirts, oversize hoodie dresses cribbed from Ariana Grande’s
wardrobe. Prices range from $85 to $450.
“I feel like that age range today is a lot more sophisticated than
it was 15 years ago,” Robin Givhan, the Washington Post fashion
critic, says, noting that there’s also so much more competition in
the space Baby Phat seeks to reoccupy. “It didn’t evolve past the
particular period,” Givhan says of why the line didn’t last the first
time. “Can she make people want her brand when it’s not clear
what it stands for at this point?”
But Kimora now is different from Kimora then. For
one thing, people wonder if she’s still rich. (She with-
drew $2,707.36 in 2017 from her son’s trust, and the
Daily Mail rang the alarm.) 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. She’s amazed that “influencer” is a job, not quite
recognizing the irony.
Yesterday, Simmons went shopping and tried on a
puffer coat. “Girl, it was so cute. I was on the phone,
trying to talk to the doctor in Germany to get my stem
cells in my back because my back hurts, when they put
the coat on me. I’m thinking, How much is it, $1,200?
I’m happy to say I have no qualms asking, ‘How much
is that?’ It’s not true that if you have to say how much
it is, you can’t afford it. It means you have some sense,”
she says. “I signal to Sabrina—she’s my shopper and my
assistant and everything, my stylist, all in one. She
asked the shopgirl, ‘How much is that?’ ”
She pauses and reveals the price like she’s Bob
Barker: “Fifteen thousand.”
Simmons mimics what her face must have looked
like in the moment, searching for an excuse that wasn’t
about money. “Girl, I said, ‘It’s tight in the arms. I can’t
get this.’ ”
She didn’t buy it. But it got her thinking—and now
she isn’t trying to take more credit than is due—about
how she put puffer coats on the map back in the day.
The coat was a staple of ’90s New York streetwear, but it wasn’t
fashion. Baby Phat designed a version that was cropped, almost
like a puffy bolero with fur around the hood, and sent it down the
runway. Now someone can charge $15,000 for one.
T THE HEIGHT of Baby Phat’s reign, David
LaChapelle shot Simmons as Madame President (or
maybe the First Lady, since her hair was styled in a
Jackie O. bob) stepping off a fake Air Force One with
her two daughters, the presidential seal replaced by
the Baby Phat cat. That’s what she was selling: the illusion of a seat
at the highest table, on your terms, wearing your streetwear.
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 ele-
vated in a way Baby Phat wasn’t. Virgil Abloh’s brand, Off-
White, is now considered high fashion and priced accord-
ingly. (A mention of Alexander Wang gets a “Who?” and then
a wave of her hand—“You’ll just have to tell me all these other
designers later.”) It used to irritate Simmons that Baby Phat,
Phat Farm, and similar brands like FUBU weren’t sold in the
same area of Macy’s as brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph
Lauren. This time, she wants Baby Phat to be a heritage
brand. She wants it to be Chanel.
“I never really thought that the clothes were particularly
great or particularly all that interesting,” says Givhan, who
sees something beyond prejudice as the reason Baby Phat
never became high fashion. “My recollection was
that at a certain point the shows really weren’t
attracting the core of the fashion industry,” because
of the unremarkable clothes and celebrity-filled
guest lists that were impossible to corral, a gladia-
tor pit of egos.
“People complained, myself included, about the
Kanye West show on Roosevelt Island,” says Givhan,
referencing the September 2016 presentation where
the audience and models waited so long in scorching
heat that people passed out. “Those things in my
memory just pale in comparison to my recollections
of the Baby Phat shows.”
One editor recalls waiting almost an hour for a
show to start, only to realize that the production had
been held up to wait for Ice-T and Coco to arrive.
And what was on the runway was about celebrity
too, musicians-as-models sneering in diamond grills
but shirts that didn’t fit well. Simmons was both
proto-Kanye and proto-Kim.
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, expand-
ing 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. In 2010, according to Simmons, Kell-
wood declined to renew her contract, and she
released a statement via one simple, disgruntled
tweet: “DEADWOOOOD!!!! :0.”
Kellwood’s Baby Phat kept going without her as long as it
could, but by 2016 the company had sold its holdings to a pri-
vate investor in Hong Kong and the brand had disappeared.
Meanwhile, Simmons launched other fashion lines and started
amassing a large portfolio of businesses that had to do with her
own personal interests, positioning herself as a venture capital-
ist. At present, she invests in Codage, a French spa and
bespoke-skin-care line that “Victoria Beckham loves”; Celsius,
a metabolism-boosting naturally caffeinated fitness drink;
Pellequr, a Beverly Hills spa “Victoria Beckham once Insta-
grammed from,” which offers CBD massages using products
from PureForm, a CBD company Simmons also invests in;
AVP America beach volleyball, because Aoki loves volleyball;
Screenbid, a company that allows people to bid on memora-
bilia from movies and TV shows; and an AI company. In 2018,
Simmons finally tracked down the Baby Phat license and64 THE CUT AUGUST SEPTEMBER ,
2003 TRACKSUIT
Alicia Keys wearing
Baby Phat in Soho.