The work of a model is inherently storytelling, and in a luminous duplex apartment in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, Aoki Lee Simmons is bringing a new narrative to life.
Her lithe figure is draped across a houndstooth armchair, limbs akimbo as she contorts her way into new shapes. In one moment, her legs extend upward, sending foot-tall, violet Marc Jacob platforms into the cosmos, basically. In the next, she’s upside down, hair delicately sprawled across the floor.
Between looks, Aoki takes control of the lens, playfully snapping an on-set Polaroid, experimenting with light and dimensions. The daughter of Kimora Lee Simmons may have daunting shoes to fill — or, rather, a vintage Chanel two-piece set — but she seems determined not to let the significance of that overwhelm her, singing along to Doja Cat’s “Like That” to assuage her nerves between frames.
As she relaxes her body into new silhouettes, the sun beams through floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the domestic milieu on set. Aoki soon positions herself so she’s enshrouded in the sun, like a natural spotlight, unrelenting. This shoot is happening on the precipice of her 21st birthday. Aoki Lee Simmons is now the author of her own story.
Many of Aoki’s earliest memories are from being on the runway. The daughter of the St. Louis-born, model-turned-mogul Kimora Lee Simmons and Queens-bred hip-hop legend Russell Simmons, Aoki and her older sister Ming were mainstays in fashion shows for her mom’s streetwear company, Baby Phat. As part of a show finale, the sisters would walk out holding hands with their mother.
Aoki was a toddler when she and her sister traipsed partway down the catwalk, charming onlookers, giving a quick wave before turning back around, an occasional twirl added for flair. Already a headstrong child, she treated the limelight as a site for play and experimentation. On one occasion, she walked so far down the platform that the family lawyer tapped her feet to prevent her from falling over the edge.
As the years progressed, that youthful whimsy evolved into a more guarded relationship with the public. By the time Aoki was a preteen, she had watched every part of her life become public fodder because of her megafamous parents.
Kimora Lee and Russell met in 1992, when he — the cofounder of Def Jam Records and manager of the iconic rap group Run DMC — was 35 and she — a successful model and muse of Karl Lagerfeld — was a teenager. They married in 1998, Ming was born in 2000, and Aoki came along in 2002. Kimora Lee’s brand, Baby Phat, started as a sister brand to Russell’s Phat Farm. Both companies gained a significant following in the hip-hop community and the culture at large, with Baby Phat's velour track suits becoming a symbol of It girl '00s style. The couple split in 2006, but their impact had already been cemented.
Kimora Lee's E! reality TV series, Life in the Fab Lane, debuted in 2007. It lasted four seasons and documented her life balancing business and motherhood. On the show, we saw Aoki scouring her mother’s closet full of vintage Chanel, bickering with her sister, and even debuting her own fashion collection with Ming at the tender age of 4. Aoki has said that while the show was on air, public input didn’t reach her — she was too young and there was no social media. But as she grew up, those outside voices crept in.
The fame of their parents meant the eldest Simmons daughters had become enmeshed in the pop culture apparatus, and were firmly in the clutches of the insurmountable beauty standards of the early aughts. That level of scrutiny was a cruel experience for a child, one that several young Black girls in high-profile families have come to know: namely, the girls' cousins, Angela and Vanessa Simmons, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s eldest child, Blue Ivy.
“At the time, I was reading a lot of crazy stuff,” Aoki says, remembering how people said things like, “Poor her, she got the dad genes.” “There were literally articles like, ‘Celebrity Kid Gone Wrong’ — and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m 11.’” To this day, she remains perplexed by any observations of a supposed “glow up”; she merely went through the natural hormonal transformation that goes with adolescence.
“Most people just don’t have [the public’s] opinions when they’re in high school,” she says. That level of surveillance is a para-social dynamic that she still works to manage. “If I said someone was talking about you… [or] 2000 people, how would you not check? Anyone would want to know.” Now she mitigates her intake of public speculation with proactive measures, such as refusing notifications and restricting who can tag her on Instagram.
We sit down for lunch at a West Village cafe. Aoki is a bundle of nerves — repeatedly fidgeting with her hair, switching from a ponytail to a bun — but she's also vivacious and an inquisitive conversationalist, thinking faster than she can talk. Nothing about her is low-energy, and we don’t remain seated for long: After we finish our respective bites, we take our talk on the road, going for a “hot girl walk” down Hudson Street, eagerly chatting about the full gamut of young womanhood.
In May, Aoki graduated from Harvard at just 20 years old. She’s no longer shuttling on trains between Cambridge and New York to model. For now, she is crashing at Ming’s NYC apartment, preparing to book gigs for her first international fashion month — New York, London, Milan, and Paris — in September.
Of course, sharing space with a sibling has led to the occasional squabble over boundaries. “The last time, she made me pay her cleaning fees…. Now, whenever I come and go, I take pictures [before and after] in the drawers, out of the drawers, in the shower.” She intends to look for a place of her own after fashion month.
Modeling now seems like a natural fit, but Aoki's current trajectory took her family by surprise. The early brush with the limelight led to her grounding herself in academics. Her mother had put her through a robust schooling curriculum since she was around two years old, and that became a safe haven. She went to boarding school alongside Ming in Switzerland, where she claims her sister was immensely popular in comparison to her more bookish persona, prone to binging episodes of Crash Course History on YouTube.
In addition to volleyball, tae kwon do, and ballet, Aoki also got into gaming and microcomputers. Her current PC setup is that of a seasoned gamer who used to be an eager participant in a competitive League of Legends team: massive wraparound screen, ergonomic keyboard, and headphones.
Kimora Lee's academic encouragement carried on through Aoki's schooling experience. “My mom and I are very academic,” she says. “It was like, my mom and I are planning to go to Harvard.”
Aoki graduated high school at 16 because she started schooling early, she says. In collaboration with her mother, she planned her college application process, indeed targeting Harvard, among other top programs in the country that were amenable to early high school graduates.
Harvard turned out to be the perfect fit. Despite her youth, Aoki was able to integrate seamlessly. “Someone said to me in my dorm when we were moving in — we were just chatting — ‘I think someone in our year is, like, 16,’” she recalls, laughing. “Wow, a baby, wonder where they’re at. No one actually ever knows it’s me.”
In college, Aoki studied political science (known as government at Harvard) and classics, investigating everything from ancient Greek mythology to political systems and global revolutions. Bucking tradition, she entered the classics discipline with a nominal background in Latin and none in ancient Greek, building her Greek linguistic skills as a research assistant under her mentor. As a freshman, Aoki's diligence landed her her first published work in Classical Inquiries, Harvard’s rapid-publication project in the Center for Hellenic Studies: a piece of speculative fiction framed around the fabled story of Agammemnon at the Port of Aulis, a Greek king who led the army into the Trojan war.
Unsurprisingly, her studies required that she become a near-permanent resident in the 24-hour library. “I think my longest library stretch was, like, five days,” she guesses. “[The security guard] was like, ‘Hey, bestie, this is the same shirt. I’ve gone home, I’ve seen my wife, I’ve had a shift change…. Go home.’”
College was a unique experience for Aoki. Not only was she younger than her classmates and attending school in the middle of a pandemic that forced the campus to adjust to a remote model, but Harvard was in the midst of a high-profile Supreme Court case on affirmative action.
Aoki, who is of Japanese, Korean, and African American heritage, is very proud of all parts of her background. She remembers pulling up her application in class to showcase that she had marked “Asian” alongside “Black” under ethnicity. “We are correcting a wrong the country deliberately made,” she says in favor of affirmative action. “The one thing we know that creates more education is [parental] education. If your dad went to college, you’re probably going to go to college, and it continues to go. Black people — your grandfather just couldn’t go, it was the law.” For her, repairing that systemic damage is paramount.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action, barring schools from using race as a consideration for admission. “When a country cuts you off from what is a very, very clear path to being successful now, to education now,” Aoki says, “to be like, ‘Wow, we shouldn’t fix it’? It’s very simple to me.”
She had no explicit intention to return to the runway after starting at Harvard, aside from the odd family-related press activity. Previously, she had been scouted as a model while playing volleyball at Mamba Academy, but after she provided her contact information, the scout backed off. “She was like, ‘Never mind, so sorry. If your mom wanted you to model, you would be,'” she recounts.
On the Harvard campus, a new opportunity materialized via a recent alumnus who contacted her through the school database. “She reached out to me and I was like, ehh, not feeling it,” says Aoki. The scout countered by pitching her the idea of it being an efficient student job, commuting to New York from Cambridge every few weeks, while she continued to pursue her studies.
Juggling academics and modeling was a delicate dance Aoki managed for years. She practiced her walk in the basement of her dorm, tweaking and refining control of her arms, powering through her stride. She pulled up to shows right at call time and did homework whenever she had downtime.
As a result, though, she rarely had time to just be a college student, often missing out on time with friends, romantic pursuits, and enjoying campus life. She was flying a million miles an hour, going from archaeological digs in the ancient Macedonian empire straight to shooting a campaign for Tommy Hilfiger in London.
Occasionally, the breakneck pace caught up to her: After a week of study and a two-day whirlwind trip, she accidentally hit her head after falling in her hotel room. “As I was speed-packing in my hotel room, I turned around and… I basically knocked myself out,” Aoki says. “That’s when I knew it was a little bit crazy. I was in the car…. kind of like crying, watching [a bump on my head] develop and swell.”
From a chance for Aoki to make some extra spending money, modeling evolved into a discipline she became emotionally invested in. She started booking shows like Sergio Hudson at New York Fashion Week and Pyer Moss’s couture show. But it was the Tommy Hilfiger 2022 Factory show that took her career to another level; she was on billboards across the country and participating in international shoots. Other brands began to take notice.
So, when school was winding down, she started to consider where she was having the most fun in her life. “I'm going to be a model,” she recalls telling her mom about her future plans. “We're not going to do — right now — grad school or law school. I'm not going to do politics or… all the other things floating around. I'm going to do this full-time for a bit.”
Her mother was supportive, though protective and matter-of-fact about the gauntlet that is the modeling industry. “She’s just like, ‘I don’t want you to be exposed to judgment,’” she remembers. “I don’t know any mom who’d be like, ‘Yeah, go in there and have them measure your butt and tell you what they think.'”
Aoki is very close with her mother. They currently reside on opposite coasts, but they regularly chat for hours. When it comes to modeling, Kimora Lee, a mother of five, has encouraged her daughter to take the reins and pursue the craft seriously. Kimora Lee doesn’t cover any of Aoki's expenses for her modeling work — she pays allowances to her children as students, not models — and Aoki quickly had to learn to manage her finances, ensuring that she could afford her chosen career. For Kimora Lee, if her daughter couldn’t afford to fly herself out and find accommodations via her bookings, then she wasn’t a working model.
“People think I’m getting top-secret information,” Aoki says with a laugh. “[They] think I can ask about my walk and she’ll have all this insight, and she’s like, ‘It’s a walk, you didn’t fall, it’s fine.’”
As the daughter of a prominent model and a titan in hip-hop history, Aoki is intimately aware that she is the quintessential “nepo baby” — she even made Vulture’s list of Top 20 nepo babies, alongside the Hadids and Jenners. And Aoki has seen other people who grew up in entertainment fumble their remarks in acknowledging the relatively comfortable position with which they entered the industry. “It’s totally true," she says. "I had no idea if I’d do modeling without my family, without their name helping me. I sometimes think when I look at shows or shoots — if I had done it, and it was that bad, and I was not me, would I get another shot? Would I have had the chance to develop the way that I have?”
Many of these advantages revolve around access, advice, and early exposure to the industry. Even if her mom is somewhat tight-lipped, most working models don’t have legendary runway coach Miss J giving last-minute tips as they practice their runway walk, or the mentorship of Tommy Hilfiger, who counseled Aoki to copyright her name early in her career. “All you can do is be grateful and try to stay in your lane a bit,” she says of the boost her family has given her.
When race is involved, however, the benefits of nepotism aren't totally equal, Aoki notes. “What I have noticed, though, is that [nepotism] is not as much of a thing for models of color,” she says. On Vulture’s list of nepo baby models, she pointed out an apparent lack of people of color, which she says may indicate who benefits most from nepotism. “It was straight-up a white list. How is no one noticing that? I don’t think nepotism functions the exact same way when you aren’t white. [Nepotism] is still a huge thing, but maybe the kids of [people of color] don’t get the same excessive hype immediately.”
Aoki’s forthright nature shines brightest in her social media presence. In an era when every piece of your existence can be commodified for “content,” following preset templates to curate engagement, she shirks convention. Her TikTok lacks the varnish of a “creator” focused on preserving their brand, instead opting for a more unpolished and candid approach. “Get ready with me to go to the gym…. except, I’m ready, and we’re just gonna be drinking beverages,” she says in the opening seconds of a video where she tries to document the self-prescribed caffeine routine she uses to push her workouts further. But she runs into a series of hiccups, which one commenter called “chaotic in the best way.”
This non-curated approach has landed her in a few social media snafus, particularly as she navigates her relationship with celebrity. There was the time she got press attention for shooting her shot at Jack Harlow: “My friends and I were doing this thing where [you’re] posting your favorite artists and, I don’t know, [he] is so fine,” she recalls. She didn’t tag him, but the media coverage it garnered made its way to Harlow. “The one time I have a normal, little teenybopper opinion, it goes somewhere.”
Her sharply phrased opinion on Darius Daulton’s public reproach of Keke Palmer after an appearance at Usher’s Las Vegas residence — remarks that were in accordance with wider public sentiment, it should be noted — made it to Entertainment Tonight. Aoki ended up messaging Palmer and apologizing, deleting her comments shortly after they were picked up. “She told me, ‘I’m fine,’” she says. “She was really sweet about it, like, ‘Speak your mind.’”
Those brushes with the press are memorable, but one moment swept through social media like a tidal wave. After the family conspicuously omitted Russell Simmons from any public father’s day celebrations, both Aoki and her mother went on Instagram to detail the private turmoil they had been managing as a family. Aoki posted FaceTime calls and texts from her father in which they argue, according to the Los Angeles Times. One FaceTime, without audio, seems to show Russell yelling at her.
Aoki also posted a video of herself explaining how her relationship with her father had taken a toll on her mental health. “I don’t regret it,” she says about speaking out, still feeling it was good to have her say. “Part of it was already out there. There were reasons I thought it was reasonable to publish, because it was playing out in, like, a silent bubble.”
Speculation had already risen when Russell was not included in Aoki and Ming’s graduation celebrations on social media; prior to that, Russell had filed suit against ex-wife Kimora Lee, accusing her of fraudulently transferring 4 million shares of the energy drink Celsius to her accounts. The claim was dismissed, and Russell was ordered to pay Kimora Lee’s legal fees.
From the public’s perspective, there was an apparent shift from the late 2010s to now: It seemed like the family had been, despite divorce, a largely cohesive unit, defending Russell amid numerous allegations against him, and had now become one in which he was on the outside looking in. Still, Aoki says, they’re a “normal family,” undergoing normal family strife.
Internal drama is far from uncommon in families of any social position. The transition into young adulthood can come with brutal growing pains; after a life of your parents being on a pedestal, you begin to contend with their flaws. That form of heartbreak can be even more difficult to navigate when you are part of a dynastic family in Black entertainment, and the fissures are openly litigated in the court of public opinion, as opposed to the relative privacy of group chats and therapy sessions.
Suddenly, Aoki was getting blowback from all angles. After she spoke out about her fractured relationship with her dad, she posted on Instagram about the misogynist responses she received. Then she put down her phone and went outside, soaking in the relative anonymity that the bustle of New York City affords. “If you don’t look at it, it’s not at all real,” she says of social media, laughing.
She also found comfort in knowing she was not alone in publicly dealing with family turmoil. Says Aoki, she recently ran into a celebrity who had experienced a similar family drama, who made her feel more at ease about speaking out, and the eventual outcome of her family relationships: “[That celebrity was] like, ‘Oh, I saw your thing. I did the same thing when I was, like, 20, and it was fine.’”
Aoki declines to comment on the numerous rape and sexual misconduct allegations made by others against her father, stressing a desire not to step out of place in consideration of all parties involved. (Russell Simmons has denied all allegations against him.)
Without question, family matters to Aoki more than anything. She is very close with her mom and siblings (she had to cut out early from a family trip to Tokyo to make this interview). Her sister, an influencer in her own right, is her go-to person for all styling and beauty tips; she effuses about her younger brother, Kenzo, who towers over her at six feet four and is part of an active AAU basketball program.
In her family, Aoki is also the one with the independent spirit. She’s the first to travel by herself, and broke the mold by moving out after college. Given that Aoki's youngest siblings are still in school, her mother had only been to two of her shows as her career was beginning. “No one kind of worries about me,” she says.
Her interests extend beyond modeling — she has toyed with the idea of starting a YouTube channel and looked into everything from journalism to refugee work — but her current focus remains on her modeling craft. She is determined to discover methods to advance her skills, which can be a tall order in a highly subjective industry that doesn’t offer much feedback. She studies the walk of Karlie Kloss, whose frame resembles her own, is inspired by Jourdan Dunn’s famed ability to pump down the runway in any shoe, and practices walking in heels regularly. Alton Mason’s infusion of his dance background into his modeling has motivated her to revisit dance and yoga classes, bringing fluidity into her editorial work. “Just like you do for an exam,” she reflects. “What can I work on? For me, that was dance movement, getting more comfortable.”
Aoki is also adjusting to getting recognized a bit more, despite the fact that she still views herself as far from being a celebrity. What used to be a rare occurrence has escalated in intensity. But her elevated profile will not preclude her from using her voice to express herself when she feels compelled. Her opinionated nature requires she stay inquisitive, challenging existing conventions and expectations of what is possible and permissible.
With a microscope over her career, she is entertaining the idea of pursuing media training. “My feedback from my team is always like, ‘Shut up, give a shorter answer,’” she says, laughing. Ultimately, though, she’s grateful for the abundance of opportunities that exist before her. After a lifetime of having her existence adjudicated by the media, she is now transitioning into adulthood and taking her own story by the reins, on and off camera, with her family firmly by her side.
PHOTO CREDITS
Photographer Whitney Hayes
Photo Assistant Vadim Krizhanovsky
Sr. Fashion Editor & Stylist Tchesmeni Leonard
Art & Design Director Emily Zirimis
Designer Liz Coulbourn
Senior Talent Casting Manager Gabrielle Seo
Associate Fashion Editor Kat Thomas
Hair Stylist Jadis Jolie
Makeup Artist Akiko Owada @ The Wall Group for Glossier
Manicurist Mamie Onishi
Assistant Fashion Editor & Stylist Assistant Tascha Berkowitz
Stylist Assistant Angelina Cantu
Tailor Carol Ai
Prop Stylist Selena Liu
Producer Chloe Snower
Editorial Intern Skyli Alvarez
Production Assistant Tim Lopez
Production Assistant Akil Mavruk
Production Assistant Cartier Moreau
Digitech Isaiah Stratton
Retouching Meredith Silverman
VIDEO CREDITS
Director: Ali Farooqui
Director: Catherine Mhloyi
EDITORIAL CREDITS
Editor-in-Chief Versha Sharma
Executive Editor Danielle Kwateng
Features Director Brittney Mcnamara
Senior Fashion & Beauty Editor Karissa Mitchell
Contributing Editor Alyssa Hardy
Audience Development Director Chantal Waldholz
Senior Social Media Manager Honestine Fraser
Social Media Manager Jillian Selzer
Copy Editor Joseph Frischmuth
