“I started to just take it in another way and create something different, which was what I thought women would want,” Lee Simmons said. “Young women like me, young women from where I was from, young women all over the United States.”
This was not often the case in the fashion industry, where some designers declined casting Black models for shoots.
Lee Simmons, who is Korean, Japanese and Black, said she recalls one time a designer refused to cast Black models. She also recalled struggling with being accepted by others “outside the circle” in her teenage years due to her biracial background and tall stature — another reason why she wanted to be inclusive with her brand.
“I worked with so many young women that I could name to this day that came and told me, like, ‘This is my last casting,’ ‘My agency said my hips are too big’ or ‘my boobs are too big,’” Lee Simmons said. “What Baby Phat represents is different to many people, but it embodies that same spirit of a beautiful life.”
Phat Farm, Rocawear, FUBU, Karl Kani and other urban streetwear brands emerged at a time when Black consumers were “tired of giving credit” to brands that were “ashamed” of them and who wanted to create brands for their own community, said Lindsay Peoples, editor-in-chief of The Cut. By buying and wearing these brands, Peoples said she felt like she belonged to a “community and a culture that really cared about me.”
“I think that even then, it felt like I wanted to support a brand that isn’t just here for the moment, that’s actually, like, here, because they care and they care about Black people,” Peoples said.
Brands like Baby Phat “created so much space for women” to feel that they belonged to “everything that was happening in hip-hop culture,” she added.
“I remember so much of Baby Phat feeling like ‘If I wear this, like, I’m going to have the best time of my life,’” she said. “Like ‘This is, this is going to be…
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