Kimora Lee Simmons - Baby Phat

Celebrity Moms - Model Mom

Kimora Lee Simmons was teased as a child because she was tall and multiracial, but things fell into place after she discovered modeling.

My friends are surprised to learn that, outgoing as I am today, I was a loner growing up. I was a mixed-race girl with a Korean-Japanese mother and an African-American father, and none of the other kids at my school were like me. I was nearly six feet tall by the time I was 11 years old. And I was an only child being raised by a single mother.

At school in the St. Louis suburb of Florissant, MO, everything about me seemed to be a source of ridicule to other kids: my face, my height, the texture of my hair, my body shape. I was a real fish out of water. And because I had so many growth spurts, it took time for me to grow into my body. The popular kids were into sports, but I was awkward and gawky. I was super clumsy—I still am. Kids can be cruel. They called me “chinky giraffe.” I cried all the time. But my mother wanted me to turn my tears into something else, something positive.

My mom, who worked for the Social Security Administration her entire life, has always been my role model. She did her best to make me feel comfortable in my own skin. She always reminded me that we’re all different and that’s to be respected. “Put on your game face,” she’d say. “Yes, it hurts, but don’t succumb to it. It will pass.”

Mom was right, of course. Even though I felt a bit like a freak in school, my unusual looks were just right somewhere else—in the world of modeling. To a camera or a catwalk, my height and exotic looks were assets instead of liabilities. Realizing this, my mother enrolled me in modeling classes when I was 11. She’d take me on “go-sees” during her lunch hour and would rush back to work. If she didn’t get back to her job on time, she’d be reported. It was stressful for her. But she did it for me because she saw how modeling seemed to be a place I could finally fit in. Almost overnight, everything the kids at school thought was weird about me was now good.

When I was 13, I was discovered by agent Marilyn Gauthier at a Model Search in St. Louis and sent to Paris. There, I was selected by Karl Lagerfeld to model his Chanel collection. It seems funny now, but at the time what I really wanted was a normal job at the grocery store like everybody else. But my mother knew that modeling offered a path with more opportunities.

She also taught me a lot about the determination of single mothers. You can’t be lazy, you can take things into your own hands, and fear can propel you. She also made it clear that working moms need to prioritize. You can’t worry about all the things on your list. You do what’s in front of you, and step-by-step, you get it all done.

Things have changed so much for career women since I was growing up. It’s accepted now that as women we work—and we’re a force to be reckoned with. But there are still obstacles, and these are universal. Every woman feels them. I’m the president of Phat Fashions, yet some people in the business world think I don’t know what I’m talking about because I’m a woman, and a woman of color. What can you do? If you speak up you’re considered bossy. You get a bad rap for knowing what you want. Through it all I try to maintain a good self-image. Now more people understand my vision.

As my mom did for me, I’m helping my own girls, Ming Lee, 9, and Aoki Lee, 7, learn about tolerance—to respect differences in culture, religion and even the way we look. I also try to set boundaries, let them know what’s expected and give them room to develop and grow. I will do the same with my infant son, Kenzo Lee Hounsou. I recently married his father, Djimon Hounsou. He’s an actor and a model, and he speaks five languages. We learn a lot from him.

I involve my kids in my work, so they can see that even though the balancing act isn’t easy, it’s possible. They also see that fashion can be a creative way to express yourself. Ming and Aoki love to sew and make their own clothes. They have a real fashion sense and inspire me creatively. I listen to their ideas and often consult them, especially for Baby Phat Girlz, one of our children’s fashion lines. Sometimes they appear with me on the runway. They love to go into my closet and pick out my clothes. Our kids help us stay youthful.

As working mothers we need clothes that are fashionable and functional. We need great basics and accessories. Every mom needs a wonderful extra large leather tote, for instance.

And we deserve respect. We’re all in the same boat. We have similar fears and hopes for our kids. We bring home the bacon, and then we enjoy it with our kids. They need us and we need them. My kids and my business make my world go ’round—they’re what I live for.

Kimora's Back to School Fashion Tips

Invest in the staples.
Buy great jeans, along with cardigans, tank tops and t-shirts for boys to layer. For girls, skirts and good pairs of leggings are musts.
Buy quality, not quantity.
Shop for value. Make sure clothes are fashionable and sturdy.

Go for dashes of color.
Rely on blacks, browns and camels— accented with red and green for boys, purples and blues for girls.

Accept who they are.
Kids express their personalities in their clothes. Allow them to be creative in how they dress.

Let them be cool.
Don’t buy them styles they don’t like, thinking they’ll come around. They won’t.

Shop For Girls Back To School Clothing at - GirlsTweenClothing.com

Baby Phat by Kimora Lee Simmons

In less than a decade, Baby Phat by Kimora Lee Simmons has positioned itself in the world of fashion as the premiere female hip-hop brand. Sassy, sexy, and stylish, Baby Phat first hit the scene as a publicity tool when tiny tees with the clever name Baby Phat were produced to electrify a Phat Farm runway show. When celebrities, supermodels and tastemakers began wearing the baby tees, a phenomenon grew, and a decision was made to launch an entire Baby Phat sportswear collection. A lifestyle brand was born.

In 1998, Kimora Lee Simmons was the natural choice to create, direct and establish the new denim label. She knew the brand's success would rely on her ability to merge the worlds of high fashion and hip-hop. Kimora's experience as a top fashion model, her marriage to Russell, her innate sense of style and her affinity for the finer things in life, would put Baby Phat at the forefront of the urban luxury movement.

From early on, the St. Louis native seemed to have a penchant for style. During the pinnacle of the supermodel era, Kimora Lee's exotic look was already changing the face of fashion. At 13, Kimora Lee was an established model - handpicked by Karl Lagerfeld as the muse for the House of Chanel. By the time she reached 16, she had already modeled for the world's most elite designers, including Giorgio Armani, Yves St. Laurent, Gianfranco Ferre, Givenchy, Fendi, and Richard Tyler. She had graced both the international covers and pages of Vogue, Elle, and Harper's Bazaar, and had been shot by some of the world's greatest photographers, including Steven Miesel and Patrick Demarchelier. A runway staple, television personality, businesswoman, and mother, Kimora Lee represents everything a woman a can be and utilizes the high fashion elegance of all that is ghetto fabulous to empower and inspire women through the Baby Phat lifestyle.



The first of her kind, Kimora's over the top personal style radiates through the Baby Phat collection - a collection the world cannot seem to get enough of. Editorial credits and features in magazines including Bazaar, Gotham, Seventeen, Star and Vibe represent the diversity of her lifestyle brand. The celebrity-filled fashion shows have become a New York Fashion Week fixture. Her lavish designs are worn and sought by everyone from Paula Abdul to Britney Spears and Lil' Kim to Alicia Keys. Influential photographers Steven Klein, David LaChapelle and Brett Ratner have all been called upon to shoot the lifestyle ad campaigns.

Baby Phat's slinky feline logo has become an internationally recognizable fashion symbol and is synonymous with the brand. The eye-catching hip-hugging signature jeans represent everything that is feminine and fun, glitzy and glamorous, sensuous and sumptuous about the Baby Phat woman. Denim separates, leather, outerwear, handbags, shoes, lingerie, jewelry, two limited edition Motorola mobile phones and a signature fragrance are tailored for the girl about town intent on raising brows. Baby Phat by Kimora Lee Simmons continues to take fashion to new heights - more than your average urban denim company - Baby Phat is a lifestyle for the glamorous woman who is everything hip-hop and everything fashion.

Style meets Performance at U.S. Open - Introducing Caroline Wozniacki and the new adidas by Stella McCartney collection

Adidas is proud to announce Danish tennis sensation Caroline Wozniacki will represent the new fall/winter 2009 adidas by Stella McCartney tennis range at the U.S. Open at Flushing Meadows. Currently ranked No. 9 on the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour, Caroline has been selected to become the exclusive new face of the tennis line and will be playing in apparel and footwear from the distinctive sport performance collection at all upcoming tournaments starting with the U.S. Open.

"For me it is essential to wear products that combine performance and style. I need to have breathable apparel and footwear that is lightweight, stable and well cushioned. With the adidas by Stella McCartney tennis line I feel like I have everything any fashionable female tennis player always dreams about: cutting-edge adidas technologies combined with Stella's unique designs that actually perform. I always play better when I feel good, that is very important to me so I'm really excited about getting out on court in it!"says Caroline Wozniacki.

Stella McCartney comments "It's very rare for a fashion designer to dress one of the top 10 players in the world. I couldn't be more thrilled and happy to be given that opportunity. Let's hope this will enhance her performance!!"

Caroline will be wearing key styles from the new fall/winter 2009 tennis collection including the Performance Dress which features adidas CLIMALITE ® technology, the Performance Hot Pant and Bra in smoked pink and the Tennis Image Jacket in dark grape. She will also wear the Skynde tennis shoe, in seed pearl, dark grape and white, which is built on the renowned adidas Barricade V tooling therefore providing the perfect mix of midfoot stability, flexibility and cushioning for maximum comfort.

Since 2007 Caroline Wozniacki has been part of the adidas Player Development Program, a service that helps nurture young tennis talent through a unique mix of advice and support, giving an extra helping hand towards building a successful career. Together with the player's own coaching team, the adidas Player Development Program strives to complement with additional training services, advice and motivation.

The fall/winter 09 adidas by Stella McCartney tennis collection hits retail in August 2009, including high-end department stores - such as Lane Crawford, Isetan, Harrods, Holt Renfrew and Nordstrom - as well as adidas by Stella McCartney available at Shopadidas
, adidas Sport Performance stores and selected sports retailers around the world. Prices range from $175 for the Skynde shoe, $130.00 for the Performance Dress and $175.00 for the Tennis Image Jacket.

 

 

Emma Watson to launch ethical fashion line?

Despite vowing she'd never dabble in the ubiquitous celebrity clothing line, the style rumour mill has gone into overdrive, with whispers that Emma Watson is set to collaborate with People Tree.

The budding fashionista is reportedly in talks the ethical fashion label to design her own collection of eco-chic garments, specifically for teens.

A source snitched to the Daily Mail, 'She's a big supporter of ethical concepts so liked the idea of this. Acting is always going to take priority, but she's keen to branch out.'

However, with the rumours remaining unconfirmed, we won't be holding our breath anytime soon.

Although the lovely Ms Watson has cemented her status as one of our favourite new style stars, she revealed to WWD just last month, 'I’m really not interested in doing it for my own ego. I’m not a designer.'

However she did add, 'If someone asked me to do something that was beneficial to a cause, then maybe I’d consider it, but not just (to be able to say) 'Look at me! I’ve got my own line!' (It's) gotten so ridiculous.'

Watson fans, keep your fingers crossed!

Story: Marie Claire

Audrey Tautou To Play Coco Chanel

Coco Before Chanel: unravelling a fashion icon

"She made up things.” That’s the not entirely encouraging opener to Axel Madson’s 1990 biography of Gabrielle Chanel.

She was so vigilant about kicking over her peasant tracks that she paid off her brothers to “disappear” and went to her grave lumbered with a tombstone that referred to her as Gabrielle Chasnel, since retrieving and correcting the misspelling legally on her birth certificate would have revealed that she was born in the poorhouse.


Perhaps embellishing her history had become a reflex. Maybe she regarded the truth as a bourgeois banal convention.

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Not that Chanel’s exhaustive self-invention has ever deterred the biographers. Madson’s is one of numerous Chanel biographies, and also one of the most readable. There have been musicals, most incongruously a Broadway one starring Katharine Hepburn, whose bony frame and patrician outspokeness appealed to Chanel, but failed to engage with audiences. In the autumn, another book will add to the Chanel canon.

Written by Justine Picardie, a former features editor at Vogue, it tantalisingly promises hitherto undiscovered details of her eventful life. In the meantime, there is Coco Before Chanel, the first of several promised Chanel biopics, this one with Audrey Tautou as a — physically at least — convincing Gabrielle.

Actually Anne Fontaine, the writer and director of Coco Before Chanel, stressed that she didn’t want to produce a standard biopic. Since most biopics are plodding, one can sympathise. Presumably that’s why Fontaine focuses on a relatively small chunk of Chanel’s long (1883 to 1971) and extraordinarily eventful life — the years before she became Chanel the celebrity, grand couturier, socialite and one of the 20th century’s first successful businesswomen.

So what we get is little Gabrielle in a moodily chiaroscuro convent-orphanage where her itinerant market trader father had dumped her and her sister (the nuns’ habits imbued her with an enduring love of black minimalism); Chanel as an ambitious but not notably talented showgirl (her soubriquet Coco came from a vaudeville song about a lost dog) whose day job was working as a seamstress in Moulins, a garrison town in the middle of France; Chanel as the mistress of Étienne Balsan, a local toff who opens a door on to a gentler, more refined life.

No wonder Chanel refused to be shaken off after he’d had his way with her, following Balsan back to his château and staying there long after the two-day invitation he had reluctantly issued expired. Balsan made her hide out of sight (as she later did with her brothers) when his fashionable friends visited.

At Balsan’s Chanel learnt to ride horses like a man, eschewing the uncomfortable precariousness of the side-saddle (cue a life-long passion for androgynous, equestrian tailoring); to despise the overblown, elaborately garnished clothes of fin de siècle society with their constricting whalebone corset and feather-smothered, headache-inducing picture hats. “How can you think in one of those?” she inquires of one of Balsan’s ex-mistresses.

Cue Chanel’s uncorseted, bone-simple sack-dresses and unadorned boaters. She learnt, too, how to hold her own with the smart set, and that she needed to be independent (Balsan, having initially viewed her as a rather embarrassing leech, came to admire, adore and eventually propose to her).

But independence was a way off. In the meantime, the surest route for a poor but pretty girl intent on making her way was to sleep with men. Chanel was too modern to become a grande horizontale (the wonderful French euphemism for high-class kept women); too classy to be an out-and-out hooker. She settled for something in between.

While still with Balsan, she met Arthur (Boy) Capel, a charming Englishman who came from a wealthy coal-mining family and spoke fluent French and, for a while, she probably slept with both. Boy, however, was the one who became the love of her life, even though he married a wealthy society Englishwoman halfway through their love affair. Boy, according to the film, sparks an infatuation with jersey. “I can only get those in England,” he remonstrated with her, half-amused, half-exasperated, as she cuts up another of his shirts to make one of her increasingly commented upon, understated dresses.

Another time Boy whisks her off to a chic coastal resort — probably Deauville where, thanks to Boy’s money, in 1915 she was to open the second of her shops — for a romantic tryst. Cue scene on the beach with Chanel looking almost comically under-dressed in one of her ankle-length, checked shift dresses while the grandes horizontales have to be practically wheeled along the sand in their galleon-like costumes. Cue next scene where Chanel and Boy watch the fishermen in their Breton stripy T-shirts hauling in the morning catch. And lo, another Chanel trope is born.

If the film’s fashion-history interludes sound heavy handed that’s because they often are. Fontaine says that she didn’t want to make a film about fashion, and it’s true for a film about one of the most stylish women of the last century, the clothes, give or take the odd breathtaking black evening gown, are a little on the dour side. By ending the film shortly after Boy is killed in a motoring accident, in 1919, we don’t get to see the bouclé suits, the little black dresses, the suntans, the fake pearls and all the other wardrobe revolutionising stuff that came in the 1920s. Mind you, Chanel is wearing piped satin pyjamas when she waves Boy off on that fatal journey — you’ll want a pair.

There’s an odd little scene at the end where an aged Chanel, perched on the famous staircase in her salon on the Rue Cambon, watches a procession of contemporary models waft past her in the label’s greatest hits (many of them designed by her successor, Karl Lagerfeld) but you need some fashion knowledge to pick up on this. Arguably the film is more interested in Chanel the plucky, ultimately tragic, little anti-Edwardian than it is in Chanel the great symbol of 20th-century modernism.

After Boy, though grief stricken, she began an affair with Stravinsky. Her business, which had begun as an unassuming millinery shop, went from strength to strength. Her witty, sometimes coruscating aphorisms, impeccable, utterly original sense of chic turned her into a celebrity. A stint in Hollywood where Sam Goldwyn paid her, in the depths of the Depression, $1 million a year to make each of his stars — Ina Claire, Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson — look like a lady (whereas, The New York Times dryly observed, most Hollywood costume designers made them look like two ladies) turned her into a very wealthy woman. She was at the heart of an artistic coterie (Cocteau, Diaghilev and Picasso were all friends) and, unprecedented for a “seamstress”, courted by society. A long affair with “Bendor”, the Duke of Westminster, had the gossip pages speculating that she would become the next Duchess of Westminster. She would have too, probably, if she had been able to have a child. Bendor was certainly keen — one night, having waved off all the other guests from his yacht, he had the anchor raised and sailed off with Chanel while a 40-strong orchestra serenaded her. But now in her forties and with a possible botched abortion or two behind her, motherhood — to her eternal chagrin — was not to be.

Through Bendor she ascended the summit of society, learnt fluent English and more importantly — in light of what later happened — befriended Winston Churchill and his wife Clemmie. By the time the Second World War broke out, Chanel had peaked. Elsa Schiaparelli, her great rival and espouser of everything she despised, was fashion’s new lodestar. The deal Chanel had struck with the Wertheimer family in the 1920s to sell perfume under her name left her feeling, as she put it, screwed. In turn, they referred to her as “that bloody woman” and had an in-house lawyer to deal exclusively with the writs that she issued against them. A strike in 1936 (by then she employed 3,000 workers) had embittered her (even though she was notoriously stingy with her models and seamstresses — she expected them to be as dedicated as she was) and in 1940 she closed the door of her salon. “At least I did that,” she would say later, when accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Schiaparelli, meanwhile, carried on selling couture throughout the war — along with Lanvin, Vionnet and the rest of the Parisdesigners. And the Wertheimers, despite being Jewish, managed to transfer their business, for the duration of the war, to an Aryan (not Chanel) and carried on making money selling flacons of Chanel No 5 to the Nazis (who, when the scent ran out, bought the display bottles).

None of Chanel’s rivals however — to public knowledge — had an affair with an SS officer. Hans Gunther von Dinklage’s mother was English, as Chanel would later point out in mitigation. And she was nearly 60 when their affair began. “At that age do you expect me to check a potential lover’s passport?” In Chanel’s mind there was nothing treacherous about their affair: indeed, incredibly, at one point she was dispatched to broker peace talks with her old friend Churchill. She failed. After the war she was arrested, released and narrowly escaped being tarred and feathered. No doubt about it, she was in disgrace and spent the rest of the decade with Von Dinklage in Switzerland.

Her comeback in 1951, wasn’t an unadulterated success either. Dior’s New Look in 1947 had changed everything, not least women’s taste for Chanel’s brand of luxurious, understated sportswear. Admirers with long memories were hopeful that Chanel, who had been off the fashion scene for 15 years, would bring about another style revolution akin to the one that she’d ignited during the First World War. What she gave them was a refined version of what she’d already done. It was a slow burn. But if the reaction to her comeback show was a politely muted indifference, within 12 months her styles were being copied around the world. This time she pioneered a form of ready-to-wear — selling patterns of her couture pieces to American department stores that allowed them to be made for more accessible prices in the US.

None of this is told in Coco Before Chanel — perhaps because the film was made with the collaboration of the house of Chanel, Fontaine was wary of going near the Nazi stuff. So it only partially shows how pivotal a part Chanel played in the liberation of women. This was a woman who spanned one era that included the tail-end of the bustle and another in which the miniskirt came and went. In between she elegantly cleared a path for women to succeed vertically, not just as horizontales. Fontaine didn’t want to make a film about fashion. Instead she’s made one about a love affair. For once, the fashion would have been more interesting.




Story: TImesOnline