bought it back—from whom, she doesn’t know, and for how
much, she won’t say. This time she’s officially adding “By
Kimora Lee Simmons,” as if slapping a name label on her lunch
box so nobody steals her food.T
HE NEXT DAY, Simmons is on set, hunched
over an ancient dining table, having a catered
meal with the crew and her family. She’s shooting
a spread for another magazine, modeling a few of
the new Baby Phat pieces against the backdrop of
a formerly glamorous but now mostly gloomy mansion that
overlooks the Champs- Élysées. The shoot was supposed to be-
gin two hours ago, but she’s listless, slow to start. Tomorrow
she might have to fly to Switzerland so she can fill
out the détaxe forms that allow her, as a non–
European Union citizen, to get back the taxes on
all the purchases she has made in Paris. (Rich
people fly to Switzerland to detox; the truly, ridicu-
lously rich, to détaxe.)
She is dressed down again today—tight jeans,
sneakers, a leopard-print T-shirt, and a Baby
Phat necklace. She wears her hair the same
length and in the same severely straight style as
she always has, an eternally thick curtain. “This
is all mine, can you believe it?,” she says to the
stylist. “Not a weave. Feel!” Simmons instructs
the white assistant on how to check for a weave:
Don’t touch the ends of the hair; inspect the
scalp, she says, taking her hand and plunging it
into the tar pits of her roots.
Simmons is called into a dressing room to start
trying on clothes, when her third and current hus-
band, 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 discov-
ered. They landed, went on a date, and the rest was
marriage. Leissner has never watchedLife in the
Fab Lane,and Simmons doesn’t want him to. He’s
more of a homebody. “He helps me a lot with busi-
ness. He’s supersmart, and we’re very close. I feel
like everybody doesn’t really know that,” she says.
They finish the call and toast each other through
the screen with their matching cans of Celsius. I notice, among
the many bracelets on Simmons’s arm, a tennis bracelet with a
ruby heart and diamonds that spell out the initialstlandkls
and a date, her wedding anniversary with Leissner, and another
tennis bracelet that’s a rainbow of multicolored diamonds. “Is
that from Tim?” I ask. “Of course,” she responds, with narrowed
eyes and aduhin her voice.
In 2016, Leissner left Goldman Sachs in the wake of one of
the biggest scandals in the bank’s history, the multibillion-dollar
defrauding of the Malaysian government. Last August, he
pleaded guilty to charges that he had conspired to launder
money and admitted to bribing officials in Malaysia and the
UAE. He forfeited $43.7 million, is barred from the banking
industry, and paid a fine of $1.4 million.
Simmons has little to say about her husband’s criminal
charges, except: “It’s not easy to fight a firm when they make youthe scapegoat.” However, she has plenty to say when it comes to
the accusations that Leissner has funded any of her fashion
brands, a story the New York Post printed shortly after he
departed Goldman Sachs. The paper had to both retract the
item and issue an apology.
“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.’ ”
The way Simmons’s legacy is wrapped up with the men she
has chosen to partner with is complicated. Her other ex, the
actor Djimon Hounsou, has just recently filed for joint cus-
tody of their son, Kenzo, in what seems like a
messy battle (TMZ has been covering). There
were the men in boardrooms at Kellwood who
decided she was too expensive, too flamboyant,
too frivolous to continue to run the company
that became successful because of her. And then
there is Russell, whose now-tarnished last name
she still carries professionally: More than a
dozen women have come forward with rape and
sexual-harassment allegations against him since
November 2017. Simmons released a statement
defending her ex-husband.
She tries to explain it again now. She’s loyal—to
her friends, to her brand, to her fans.
“And that’s not to say even that I’m letting
Russell off the hook. He had a lot of things com-
ing up from before I was born. He’s never had a
case brought against him,” she says. They still
co-parent. Aoki just visited him in extradition-
free Bali, where he often stays.
I ask Simmons how much of the new chapter of
Baby Phat is about reclaiming her legacy. “Reclaim-
ing” isn’t right, she says.
She starts talking through it at Autobahn
speed. Zooming through possible motivations for
everything she does until she crashes into it: fear.
“Even though I’ve been married for most of my
life and have four kids, it’s always like,What if
you’re not married? What if you’re alone?I’ve
been all these things. I don’t want to wait for peo-
ple to not need me. I would rather go out on the
top. I think that’s better.”
And yet the reasons she wants to relaunch Baby Phat are
still sort of unclear—money, surely, a return to glitzy rele-
vancy, perhaps.
“Mommy, what’s enough?” Simmons’s youngest, 4-year-old
Wolfie Leissner, asks while he eats his lunch. Wolfie has her
hair—it’s longer than his tiny wingspan—and, apparently, her
philosophy on excess.
Simmons pauses, contemplating how to explain the concept
of enough to someone who is just beginning to speak in full
sentences. And is there even such a thing when you have a black
AmEx card to throw down? When you don’t get the respect you
deserve, when the world has taken your work and relegated you
to period-piece curio? Whatisenough?
But, as she’d told me, she doesn’t want to raise jerks, which
requires boundaries. She settles on: “Just eat what’s already on
your plate, baby.” ■AUGUST SEPTEMBER , THE CUT 652019 TRACKSUIT
From the
current collection.PHOTOGRAPHS: BILL DAVILA/FILMMAGIC/GETTY IMAGES (KEYS); COURTESY OF THE DESIGNER (PRODUCT)