Kimora Lee Simmons is no stranger to reality TV — but she didn’t rush back to it. Long before Kimora: Back in the Fab Lane, Simmons built a public-facing empire that fused fashion, family, and high-profile ambition.
From her days turning Baby Phat into a cultural force to starring alongside her daughters on her original E! series, she helped define a particular era of celebrity reality television.
Then she stepped away. For more than a decade, Simmons stayed mainly out of the spotlight as her life kept expanding.
“I was a mom of two,” Simmons said in an exclusive interview with E! “I’m now a mom of five, and I have a lot of other kids all around. I’ve changed careers a few times, husbands, investments. People are older — I’m a boy mom, I was a girl mom. People have driver’s licenses.”
That personal evolution is precisely what drew cameras back into her orbit.
According to Simmons, the return to reality television wasn’t self-initiated. Instead, it came from people around her insisting that her real life — busy, layered, and undeniably chaotic — was already television-ready.
“I feel like people around me are like, ‘Oh god, you’re so crazy. This is so much going on. You should have cameras,’” she explained. Simmons initially resisted the idea, saying she’d already lived that chapter.
But persistence won out. “That ‘I’m really serious’ talk becomes a ‘here we go, we just need you to have a little meeting,’” she recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Really?’”
Now, Kimora: Back in the Fab Lane marks her first reality series in over ten years, premiering Tuesday, December 2 on E! The show brings viewers into her current world — one shaped by parenting older children, raising younger ones, and balancing multiple ventures at once.
Still, the experience has been different this time around, especially for her daughters, Ming and Aoki Lee Simmons, who were kids during the original series and are now young adults. “They’re young adults, so I’m not there to protect them and do everything,” she said. “It’s been a journey.”