How Kimora Lee Simmons Brought High Fashion to Hip-Hop
Kimora Lee Simmons used high fashion experience to build Baby Phat into a cultural behemoth. At a time when hip hop was just permeating pop culture, Simmons showcased just how luxurious and fabulous it could be. The brand was successful because of its strong creative vision, savvy marketing tactics, and ethos centered around women’s empowerment.
I spent most of my high school years poring over Teen Vogue and Seventeen magazines, ripping out the pages that inspired me most, and saving them in a binder. The daydreams that followed were of me at an editor’s desk living the life of a tastemaker. During those years, from 2007 to 2011, I sometimes got to escape to a world filled with runway shows, over-the-top ad campaigns, and VIP moving and shaking. While 14-year old me wasn’t actually running the Baby Phat fashion empire, Life in the Fab Lane got me close enough.
The first episode took us inside Baby Phat offices in New York City where Kimora and her team were planning an ad campaign and trying to stay under budget. We saw the initial concepts and the final shoot in LA. In the second episode, Kimora is deciding what to wear to a Vanity Fair party and becomes the first woman to don the cover of Source magazine. For the little girl who liked to play Barbies and dress-up, Kimora lived out my Life-Size dreams. During the same season, there was an episode where Ming and Aoki Lee Simmons, kids at the time, designed and modeled their own fashion line. In my own life, I leaned into journalism and joined Yearbook. The empire that Kimora Lee Simmons built didn’t just show me what was possible, but it said that I could do it too.
Founded in 1999 as the womenswear counterpart to Russell Simmons’ Phat Farm, Baby Phat helped shape an era of style. The first of its kind and designed solely for women, the brand took the best parts of high fashion, luxury, and hip hop and turned them into a lifestyle.
Baby Phat came on the scene just as hip hop began to merge with pop culture. The brand carved its own lane by catering to women and their form: cropped and fur-trimmed puffer jackets, jeans with curve-hugging stretch, the infamous velour tracksuits. Between 2001 and 2002 Baby Phat’s revenue boosted from $30 million to $265 million. In true Simmons fashion, it was the lifestyle that helped sell the clothes.
“More than that, Baby Phat was not simply a brand, it was a luxurious lifestyle, fueled by every gold-plated chain, rapper endorsement, and swipe of a cat-branded VISA. Simmons brought streetwear to a gender that didn’t have it before—and, through her model castings and close ties to the hip hop elite, brought representation to communities within that gender that had long been ignored.” (Fashionista)
So what did Kimora Lee Simmons do that launched her brand into such massive success? She took cool-factor, high fashion and luxury and showed us why it was hip hop.
She disrupted the industry with a redefined vision of just how high-fashion ghetto fabulous could be. She paired her savvy expertise with the lifestyle of a model, fashion mogul, and motherhood, and wrapped it into inclusivity and empowerment for women.
Read: The Building Blocks of Ghetto Fabulous
It’s the same torch of another certain fashion mogul making waves in the luxury fashion, makeup, and lingerie spaces. Rihanna is even said to have bought Baby Phat archives two summers ago. There’s Coco Chanel, there’s Kimora Lee Simmons and there’s Rihanna. The strategy Kimora wielded turned Baby Phat into a cultural behemoth and empowered a generation of women.
The Muse of Karl Lagerfeld
Kimora started as a model when she was 13, signing an exclusive modeling contract with Chanel under the creative direction of Karl Lagerfeld. She went on to walk the runway at other houses, like Dior and Saint Laurent. Still, Chanel was her roots and that signature point of view certainly influenced her vision for Baby Phat.
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was a tastemaker in her own right. She created a new style for women post-World War I.
“Chanel's silhouettes were fluid and androgynous, her designs loose and -- in the case of her iconic little black dress, or LBD -- democratic. She wanted women to move and breathe in her clothes, just like men did in theirs. Her work was, in many ways, a form of female emancipation.” (CNN Style)
Fashion shapes culture in a way that is utilitarian. It is a sign of the times. Chanel’s silhouettes spoke of freedom for women. Freedom from the corsets and lace frills. Freedom to move through the world in comfort and style. Kimora Lee Simmons revolutionized streetwear for the female form. A passing of the torch for women’s revolution.
“Coco Chanel liberated women from corseted couture in 1910, when she dared to craft casual women's wear from men's jersey fabric. Simmons Leissner arguably did the same in 1999, as the first designer to offer hip-hop-inspired streetwear tailored to women's bodies and sensibilities. Where Chanel gifted the world with the Little Black Dress, Simmons Leissner bestowed upon us the Little Baby Tee.” (Fashionista)
At the heart of Baby Phat is the intentional centering of uninhibited womanhood as the personification of fabulosity.
On Marketing Fabulosity
The presentation of Baby Phat was just as much about sharing a lifestyle as selling clothes. The brand’s over-the-top fabulousness made it so that eventually the marketing spoke for itself. The messaging was deeply intertwined with who Baby Phat was at its core. Those marketing tactics are tent poles in the brand’s legacy. Baby Phat spoke to the empowerment of women using Kimora as a symbol.
Highlights of this savvy include:
Baby Phat runway shows were designed to ooze brand culture from its pores. “The over-the-top runway shows were pop-cultural spectacles in and of themselves, a rotating who’s-who with everyone from Brittany Murphy to Queen Latifah mingling in the front row. The hip hop and fashion worlds happily clashed within Simmons’ fashion week tent, while many of the decade’s most iconic sartorial moments (like Cam’ron in that baby pink outfit) occurred right outside.” (CR Fashion Book). The events became a symbol for the lifestyle itself and the association gave the brand cool-factor.
Signature ad campaigns that were bold expressions of empowered womanhood. Scenes that envisioned a world with women at the helm, wearing what they wanted. “Ads depicted Kimora living the glamorous life, stepping off a reimagined version of the Air Force One, clad in a pink printed jacket and oversized black sunglasses. The men in that famed image cater to her, holding her pink handbag and carrying her luggage as she waves to an adoring crowd of fans. In the world of Baby Phat, Kimora is President.” (Teen Vogue)
The Baby Phat cat logo and high-profile licensing deals. Licensing deals allowed Baby Phat to expand outside of clothing while staying true to its brand culture. In 2003 there was the Baby Phat prepaid VISA card. In 2004, the notorious quilted Motorola flip phone with 0.4-carat diamonds. At its peak the brand had ~50 licenses.
The 2019 relaunch (Baby Phat x Forever 21). The brand has made a resurgence in the last few years, capitalizing on today’s Y2K nostalgia. In true Baby Phat fashion, the rollout was legacy creative direction and intentional audience targeting. For starters Ming and Aoki Lee Simmons were front and center in the ad campaigns — this time all grown up. They announced on International Women’s Day. Also, the brand launched in a phased approach, starting with a 17-piece capsule collection with Forever 21 before moving direct-to-consumer on babyphat.com. Forever 21 was a solid choice considering their Gen. Z customer base. Baby Phat was in part so successful because of a clearly identified target customer. “Simmons identified the Baby Phat girl early, and she identified her well. While streetwear emerged from a combination of global subcultures, from Harlem rappers to Tokyo skaters, the women of those communities were largely ignored. The Baby Phat customer, at her core, was a streetwear enthusiast who just didn’t want the watered-down scraps of what male celebrities wore.” (CR Fashion Book)
The creative vision of Kimora Lee Simmons for Baby Phat, paired with smart marketing tactics fueled the brand’s success. At a time when hip hop was becoming mainstream, the Baby Phat surfaced as a disruptor, challenging contemporary notions of streetwear and offering its own spin. Those contributions to American streetwear have shaped trends in the last decade.
