‘Oooooh, I like this,” said Kimora Lee Simmons, staring at herself in a mirror at the Louis Vuitton store on St. Barth’s. She was modeling a new Louis Vuitton bag, but could have been talking about the whole effect of Kimora-and-bag. “Fabulous,” she said.

Kimora is 29, a former supermodel, the wife of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, and the self-styled First Lady of Hip-Hop. “I feel like Coretta Scott King,” she told me, speeding in her Bentley to an event for her husband’s Hip-Hop Summit Action Network last fall. “I am so proud of Russell,” she said. Somebody mentioned we were running two and a half hours late. “I will do a backflip down that red carpet,” said Kimora. “I don’t care.”

She is six feet tall, raven-haired, almond-eyed, with 42-inch legs, a size 4. “I am anorexic,” she told me in the offices of her Baby Phat clothing company, in New York. “My doctor says it’s having an unhealthy relationship with food. After I had my babies I was thick.” It was at the same meeting that Kimora pulled down her jeans so that several (female) designers could see the Victoria’s Secret thong she was wearing, as inspiration.

“I’m just so, so—” she said at the meeting, waving her hands in the air. “I can’t eat!” She’s had a very full schedule lately: Designing the faux-diamond-encrusted jeans and mohair-boot fashions of Baby Phat (which was sold in 2004 to the Kellwood Company, a clothing conglomerate, reportedly netting Kimora $20 million; she stayed on as creative director). Co-hosting the talk show Life & Style, Sony Television’s homegirl version of The View. (“I hate it!” she told me. “I thought it would be fun! I’m not used to having a boss. I’m the boss. I don’t need the money. I’m filthy fucking rich!”) Overseeing the upcoming Kimora makeup, the Kimora fragrance, and “Barbie by Kimora Lee Simmons.” She also has a deal with HarperCollins to write two books—a lifestyle book on “how ...