Kimora Lee Simmons

Kimora Lee Simmons (née Perkins; May 4, 1975) is an American model, business woman, fashion designer, venture capitalist, entrepreneur, TV personality, philanthropist and author. She was signed with the house of CHANEL as a teenager where she became a model and has walked the runway for fashion houses such as Fendi and Valentino and appeared on the covers of Vogue and Elle. In 1999 she launched the global lifestyle brand Baby Phat to huge success around the world. 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. 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. Early life Kimora Lee Perkins was born in St. Louis, Missouri. 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 2017, Simmons returned to school, and in 2018, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Business and Entrepreneurial Affairs from the online University of Hartford's Barney School of Business in Hartford, Connecticut.