How did Bling Empire star Jaime Xie become a fashion influencer? The daughter of Silicon Valley billionaire Ken Xie traded horseback riding for fashion weeks as a teenager

Feb 4 , 2021

Jaime Xie has over 300,000 followers on Instagram. Photo: @jaimexie/Instagram

She grew up ‘surrounded by tech and Teslas’ but prefers Dior, Louis Vuitton and Hermès – showing off her looks on Instagram

She ran into future cast mate Christine Chiu in Paris, but never watched a reality TV show before starring in the Netflix series

A few years ago, Jaime Xie’s mother made her a bet. “My mum was like, Jaime, if you get into Parsons, I will get you a Birkin,” Xie said, referring to the exclusive Hermès handbag that often features in the collections of billionaires like Nita Ambani.

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

Jaime Xie, soon to be owner of (another) Birkin? Photo: @jaimexie/Instagram

Jaime said that although she was born and raised in Silicon Valley, “surrounded by tech and Teslas”, tech wasn’t really her thing. Instead, she’s been in love with fashion since middle school, when she realised Chanel and Louis Vuitton were much cooler than the Hollister and Abercrombie she had hanging in her wardrobe.

So naturally, Xie wanted to study fashion business at New York’s Parsons School of Design, one of the top fashion schools in the US. She also really wanted that Birkin her mother was offering – it would be her first, after all.

She got into Parsons (and got the Birkin), but she opted against attending, enrolling instead in the close-to-home Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. About a year later, she dropped out to focus on influencing full-time. Now she has just over 300,000 Instagram followers.

Currently, she’s making almost US$100,000 a year from brand collaborations and partnerships. She buys her own clothes with her own money and was regularly attending couture weeks in Paris and fashion shows in Milan before the pandemic. Snapshots of her life can be seen on the new hit Netflix series Bling Empire, which chronicles the lives of wealthy Asians and Asian Americans living in Los Angeles.

Despite coming from a wealthy family, Xie said that staying humble is important to her. She grew up like most teenagers, cooking for herself and her family as well as cleaning her own room. Her mother does the family laundry by herself. “We live like a normal family,” she said. “I love this because it keeps me grounded.”