Before she was a fashion mogul, reality TV personality, and mother of five, Kimora Lee Simmons was a 13-year-old girl who got her start in the adult world of high fashion and paid a heavy emotional, even financial, price for it.
Sitting down with people, Simmons pulls back the glamorous veil on her early career as a model, explaining that beneath the couture gowns and flashing paparazzi cameras was a lonely teenager with $5,000-a-month phone bills and severe homesickness.
“I was running up a phone bill,” Simmons conceded. “My phone bill is nuts. It was something like $5,000 a month because that’s when it was long-distance.
There were no FaceTime calls or international texting plans to keep her in touch with her family in Missouri. Instead, it was all collected calls and credit cards once, and strangers were even billed to hear her mother’s voice.
“You didn’t have calling plans and the Wi-Fi,” she said. “We didn’t have that. You had a collect call. You killed it on your credit card, or you expensed someone else for it. It was like, ‘Where’s my mom?’ ”
Kimora left childhood behind before ever getting to high school, flying to Europe to model for the top fashion houses, such as Chanel, with the late great Karl Lagerfeld. She modeled for Fendi, the Italian luxury fashion house, Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent, and her powerfully multiracial looks, which helped her stand out in a then-homogeneous industry, were frequently celebrated. She was even honored with the finale walk of Chanel’s 1989 haute couture show “The Bride,” which would seem like a lifetime achievement for anyone, let alone a teenager.
But looking back now, Simmons knows how intense they were and how wrong those early experiences were.
“As I got older, I realized I was like the baby,” she said. Karl even used to tell me things like, ‘What we used to do is illegal now’ labor laws and kids. So yeah, we got into it a little earlier.”
Walking among titans of an industry in those early days, feeling like a kid away from home, shaped her deeply. They ignited the ambition that would eventually take her all the way to creating her own empire, from her pioneering Baby Phat brand to her ventures in media and philanthropy.
Today, Simmons talks with grizzled wisdom, the insight of someone who’s had the glistening and grime of fame. To the rest of the world, it might have looked like a poised young model walking confidently down the runway, but behind the scenes, a girl was simply trying to get to her mom and paying for it, one long-distance phone call at a time.
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