Kimora Lee Simmons

Kimora Lee Simmons (née Perkins; May 4, 1975 ) is an American model, businesswoman, fashion designer and television personality.

She was signed with the house of Chanel as a teenager where she became a model.

She has walked the runway for fashion houses such as Fendi and Valentino and appeared on the covers of Vogue and Elle.

After closing the 1989 Chanel haute couture show as "The Bride," Simmons went on to walk the runways for such fashion houses as Fendi, Valentino, Emanuel Ungaro, and Yves Saint Laurent as well as appear on covers and in the pages of such fashion publications as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Elle.

The label was launched as a women's wear off-shoot of the men's streetwear line, Phat Farm and overarching fashion label Phat Fashions, which Russell Simmons, her then husband, had founded in 1992.

Like Phat Farm and other black-owned fashion labels that emerged around the same period, Baby Phat was created to offer consumers color collections that were authentic to the culture.

Mirroring the trajectory of the hip-hop music and style that inspired it, however, Baby Phat eventually grew to cross all barriers of culture and race, reaching mass-marketability and entering the lexicon of both fashion and popular culture.

In 1999, she launched the global lifestyle brand Baby Phat to huge success around the world.

In 1999, Simmons launched the global lifestyle brand, Baby Phat.

On September 15, 1999, Baby Phat debuted its first fashion show at New York Fashion Week.

The show was held at Radio City Music Hall and streamed live to the Jumbotron in Times Square.

With celebrities like Aaliyah, Lil' Kim (who also walked the Baby Phat runway in 2000), Missy Elliot, Mary J. Blige, and Paris Hilton in attendance, Baby Phat fashion shows were a frequent focal point during New York Fashion Week.

Simmons concluded every Baby Phat show by walking the runway with her daughters, Ming Lee and Aoki Lee, in hand.

Of being a mother and a business woman, Simmons told Refinery29: "Of course having my babies on the runway with me is still number one for me as a mother. But I also really loved our front rows. The celeb and musician friends that supported the brand also inspired it - really innovative women who pushed the world forward to embrace the urban lifestyle when many in the business and in society at large did not have the vision or foresight [to do so]. This was a movement. People forget that."

Simmons was eventually appointed president and creative director of Phat Fashions, which included Baby Phat, Phat Farm, Baby Phat Girlz and Phat Farm Boys, thus becoming one of the first women of color ever to preside over a stable of fashion brands.

During her tenure as Creative Director of Baby Phat, Simmons created an entirely new category of urban lifestyle apparel and accessories designed for women by women.

Baby Phat's commercial success (the company was at one point estimated to be worth in excess $1 billion ) and cultural impact ultimately drove the expansion of Phat Fashions into a multitude of new product categories that included jewelry, handbags, footwear, swimwear, outerwear, infant accessories and fragrance, all of which were distributed on a global scale.

Over time, the Baby Phat fragrance portfolio grew to include a total of six perfumes: Goddess, Golden Goddess, Seductive Goddess, Fabulosity, Luv Me, and Dare Me, the last of which was produced in Partnership with COTY Fragrances.

Outside of fashion and modeling Kimora also received a Tony award in 2003 for her work as a producer on Def Poetry Jam on broadway.

Kimora Lee Perkins was born in St. Louis.

Growing up in the northern St. Louis suburb of Florissant, Missouri, Simmons was a frequent target of bullying at school.

Because of her height (5'10" by age ten) and multiethnic background (she is African-American on her father's side and Japanese-Korean on her mother's), Simmons struggled to find confidence and felt, in her own words, "different." In an effort to bolster Kimora's confidence, Kimora's mother enrolled her in modeling classes when she was eleven years old. Two years later, Simmons attended a model search event in Kansas City, where she was discovered by the event's organizer, Marie-Christine Kollock, an agent from the prominent Paris modeling agency, Glamour. Kollock then sent Simmons to Paris, where she would soon find favor with fashion industry leaders and begin her modeling career in earnest.

Simmons is a graduate of Lutheran North High School in St. Louis, Missouri.

In 2007 she alongside her family ventured into reality television and starred in Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane on E! Network which aired 4 seasons.

In 2010, Simmons parted ways with Phat Fashions and its parent company Kellwood.

The following year, Simmons announced her new position as President and Creative Director of JustFab, a personalized shopping website.

Simmons served in this role until 2015.

Following her tenure at JustFab, Simmons began work on the development of a new fashion label, and in the pre-fall season of 2015, KLS by Kimora Lee Simmons debuted its first collection.

The namesake women's wear line offers upscale apparel at entry-level price points in the American designer category.

Following development, KLS by Kimora Lee Simmons was marketed for nationwide placement within the designer arena at high-end luxury retailers such as Bloomingdales, Lord and Taylor and Farfetch.

In 2017, Simmons returned to school, and in 2018, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Business and Entrepreneurial Affairs from the University of Hartford's Barney School of Business in Hartford, Connecticut.

At the age of thirteen, Simmons secured an exclusive modeling contract with Chanel and began working under the tutelage of Chanel's then designer, the late Karl Lagerfeld.

Lagerfeld and Simmons's mentor-muse relationship happened at a time in fashion history when a multiethnic look like Simmons's was uncommon in high-end fashion advertising.

As Simmons remembers: "Karl chose to put a mixed-race model on a Parisian runway before anyone else. By his example, I learned how to stand tall and claim my destiny - to dream bigger than I ever thought possible and command my dreams into reality."

On International Women's Day, March 8 of 2019, Simmons delivered the keynote address at the launch of the She Innovates initiative led by UN Women's Gender Innovation Coalition for Change (GICC).

There, Simmons announced to Bloomberg News the reacquisition and forthcoming return of Baby Phat, by Kimora Lee Simmons.

The new Baby Phat would retain the same ethos of female-empowerment as did the brand's first iteration by being woman-owned, woman-led and, as ever, designed for women by women.

Baby Phat relaunched in the summer of 2019 and then debuted a new signature collection in the fall of 2019.

In an interview about the relaunch of Baby Phat, Simmons said to Women's Wear Daily: "The relaunch of Baby Phat will be comprised [sic] a mainstream sportswear collection for millennials targeted to the mid-tier retail level. Over the past several years, we realized that Baby Phat resonated with people and lives deep in their souls. Young people have an appetite for design with a purpose and place importance on a need for messaging that is similar to what Baby Phat represented in its prime and still can today."

Simmons has built a diverse portfolio of investments in new and innovative businesses in such fields as fashion, skin care, consumer goods and technology.