‘Bling Empire’ star Jaime Xie opens up about fortune and fashion influence

[ad_1]

Jaime Xie, daughter of a tech billionaire, is known for being a fashion influencer and for appearing on Netflix’s hit show “Bling Empire”.
She says she earns nearly $ 100,000 as an influencer and is frequently seen in New York, London, Milan and Paris during fashion weeks.
In an interview with Insider, she talks about her love for fashion, what it was like to be on “Bling Empire” and her upcoming career plans.
Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.

A few years ago, Jaime Xie’s mother made him a bet. “My mom was like, Jaime, if you walk into Parsons, I’ll get you a Birkin,” Xie told Insider, referring to the exclusive Hermes handbag.

Xie is the 22 year old daughter of billionaire Ken Xie, the Asian American billionaire who built the world’s first firewall and VPN. Currently the founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Fortinet, he previously founded Systems Integration Solutions and NetScreen, the latter of which he sold to Juniper Networks for $ 4 billion in 2004.

Jaime told Insider that although she was born and raised in Silicon Valley, “surrounded by tech and Teslas,” tech wasn’t really her thing. She said she had been in love with fashion since college, when she realized that Chanel and Louis Vuitton were a lot cooler than the Hollisters and Abercrombie she had hung in her closet.

So naturally, Xie wanted to study the fashion business at Parsons, one of the top fashion schools in America – she also really wanted Birkin that her mother offered her – it would be her first, after all.

She entered Parsons (and earned the Birkin), but chose not to attend, enrolling instead at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. About a year later, she gave up to focus on influencing full time. Now, she has just over 300,000 Instagram followers.

Now, Xie told Insider, she earns nearly $ 100,000 a year through collaborations and brand partnerships. She buys her own clothes with her own money and she regularly attends sewing weeks in Paris and fashion shows in Milan before the pandemic. Snapshots of her life can be seen in Netflix’s hit new series “Bling Empire,” which chronicles the lives of wealthy Asians and Asian Americans living in Los Angeles.

Read more: Meet the ‘Bling Empire’ High Fashion Collector Bringing Rich Asian-born Angelenos to Netflix

Xie vividly remembers the months leading up to the pandemic. She had attended Couture Week in Paris, then traveled to Davos to see her father speak at the World Economic Forum. They went skiing in Saint Moritz, Switzerland, then Xie attended other fashion weeks and returned to California in March exhausted.

“I was coming home to relax, but had no idea the cool-down time was going to be that long,” she said. Jobs froze for a while at the beginning of last year but started to pick up in the summer, and she was able to attend a charity gala with Luisaviaroma and UNICEF on the Amalfi Coast in August.

Her influencer career has only been slightly affected by the pandemic, she said, and she divides her time between the Bay Area and Los Angeles, where she has most of her photoshoots.

Xie attended her first fashion week when she was 17

A competitive equestrian, Xie spent her high school years entirely online as she traveled the country on horseback. Even then, she said, she couldn’t go a day without thinking about fashion.

Much of her fashion knowledge is self-taught, reading magazines and tracking fashion websites. Her first designer purchase was around seventh year – a Louis Vuitton Neverfull tote and a Hermès belt – the one with the big H on it. At 17, she attended her first fashion show. It was Dior.

The brand invited Xie and her mother to the launch of their new fine jewelry collection in Paris after Xie convinced her mother to buy a plethora of the brand’s jewelry. Unbeknownst to Xie, she and her mother arrived just in time for sewing week.

Read more: Westside Gunn. A rapper. An executive of a record company. A collector of contemporary art.

At the time, they were staying at the Plaza Athénée hotel on the Champs-Elysées. One day, they ran into Christine Chiu, future castmate of “Bling Empire”, who broke the news to him. “When I passed her she said, ‘Oh yeah, I’m here to see a bunch of shows,’” Xie recalls. “I was like, okay, then in September I want to go to all the ready-to-wear shows, starting with New York.”

Back in California, Xie also became known in her circle of friends as someone with good taste.

“Jaime’s sense of style is multifaceted,” his close friend Mathew Sakhai, 22, told Insider. “She can go from girly and sweet to edgy and dark without making you think she doesn’t have a fashion identity because you can see her mark in every look she chooses.” Xie loved – and still loves – wearing emerging and new brands, mixing them with heritage houses like Prada and Mugler. She loves vintage, especially at Gucci, Chanel and Dior. “When I have some free time, I’ll just browse Vestiaire Collective, eBay, for some cool vintage,” she says. “What I like about vintage is that it’s not something that everyone will have.”

She also has more affordable brands in her closet. Her mentality is that she will buy anything and everything that goes well, “be it Zara or Chanel”. In fact, Xie said she used to shop so much as a teenager and spend so much of her parents’ money that they made her find a summer job at Nordstrom’s when she was 18 to “appreciate the value.” money”.

Xie keeps it real on Instagram: “ Very laid back, somewhat relatable ”

Meanwhile, Xie was posting photos of her outfits on Facebook. She branched out on Instagram and YouTube on the recommendation of her equestrian friends, who felt she had a good sense of style.

On YouTube, Xie started unpacking videos, which meant she would unbox her designer purchases in real time and show them to the public. She stopped doing them despite positive comments, she said, because she didn’t like showing off her wealth in such an extreme way.

Read more: Inside the weird and expensive pandemic shopping for rich kids, from the $ 1,000 Patagonia fleece to a $ 31.8 million T. rex

So, she pivoted to focus more on Instagram, where, she says, she likes to “keep things real.” Her page is a mix of selfies, magazine photoshoots and street style. “Very laid back,” she explained. “A little relatable.”

Around the age of 19, she decided to go into digital content creation full time and is now invited to fashion shows around the world as an influencer. She travels frequently between New York, London, Milan and Paris. Before the pandemic, there was a sewing week twice a year, in January and July. Then there was the ready-to-wear in February and September, then other shows in between, like bridal weeks and menswear.

Xie said she used to change her outfit about five to six times a day “because you wear a different look every show,” she says. “It is a sign of respect for the creator.”

Xie had never seen reality TV before ‘Bling Empire’

Lately, Xie has been thinking about the next step in his career. She wants to launch a line of sunglasses, and a line of shoes is not out of the question. As a vegan, she said she was also willing to explore opening up something regarding a healthy lifestyle and wanted to get into philanthropy, working more with her family foundation.

She never thought she would end up on reality TV, however. Growing up, she never watched reality TV, and was the last person to join the cast of “Bling Empire” during its development in 2018. When asked for advice on how to acting on the show, she said the producers told her to just be herself and “have fun.”

This is perhaps best summed up in the scene where the cast of “Bling Empire” is on the beach talking to a shaman. Xie asked the healer a question: What color should the Bottega Veneta bag be? It was, of course, fashion week, and the color choices are endless. Unfortunately, the scene was cut before the shaman could give him an answer.

“I ended up having the color of the mist,” she says. “And then I got a crumpled gold one, then a light blue one with the intrecciato weave of Bottega Veneta, and then I got a mini little gold – it looks like a mini golden dumpling. It’s like, the cutest thing ever. “

[ad_2]

Source link