Upper East Side Mom Who Posts Luxurious Life Online Responds to Criticism That She's ‘Out of Touch with Reality’(Exclusive)
- - Upper East Side Mom Who Posts Luxurious Life Online Responds to Criticism That She's ‘Out of Touch with Reality’(Exclusive)
Luke ChinmanDecember 12, 2025 at 5:03 AM
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Kim Roshanski
Kim Neeli -
Kimmy Neeli, a stay-at-home mom living in New York City, chats with PEOPLE about the life of luxury she shares online
The mom of four maintains a following of 300,000 on Instagram, where she shares everything from her summers in the Hamptons to tips for putting together a fall outfit
“You don’t put your life on public display and not expect people to make assumptions about you all day,” says Neeli
Kimmy Neeli knows how her life might look when you first see her Instagram page.
The account, where she has nearly 300,000 followers, screams luxury. Neeli’s New York City apartment, on a top floor of an Upper East Side high-rise, features a luxe black and gold staircase through the center and boasts stunning views of Manhattan from her kitchen window. She summers in the Hamptons and vacations in Saint-Tropez. Her 43rd birthday party, held in August, was “Hermès-themed” after the French designer brand.
“You don’t put your life on public display and not expect people to make assumptions about you all day,” the stay-at-home-mom of four tells PEOPLE in an interview. “I signed up for that, and that’s something I have to be OK with.”
When Neeli is asked to detail some of these assumptions, she’s unafraid to name them: “That I’m out of touch with reality, that I have no idea what hardship is, that I’ve never had a tough day in my life.”
“Anytime I post a vlog, it literally opens up the floodgates to criticism. In the beginning, it was a bit shocking,” she says. "But now, I just don’t care.”
Neeli’s story starts as a kid in El Paso, Texas. She’s the product of her parents: a mom who loved opulence, and a dad who impressed on Neeli and her sister that failure was not an option. She went to college in Texas and then on to law school in California with plans to take the bar exam and to practice law in the state.
Then came her now-husband Mark. They met each other at a party in N.Y.C. while Neeli was still living in California, preparing for the bar. After two months of dating, she followed her gut, changed her exam from California to New York, graduated from law school, and boarded a flight with five suitcases to start her career in the Big Apple the next day.
Kim Roshanski
Kim Neeli
“Everybody told me I was crazy,” says Neeli, “And I said, ‘I’m not. I know what I’m doing.’ ”
Working in the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office after passing the bar — prosecuting white collar crimes — Neeli’s parents’ influence served her well. She had her father’s fearlessness, but it was her mother’s love of fashion, which Neeli too had embraced, that would catch the courtroom off guard.
“My boss would sometimes say to me, ‘Oh Kimmy, there’s just something about you that’s not simple when you walk into a courtroom,’ ” she remembers. “And I said, ‘That’s perfect, because they’re never going to know what’s coming.’ I love the courtroom. I called it my intellectual stage.”
After several years, Neeli and Mark welcomed their first kid. Neeli never expected she would give up her law career to be a stay-at-home mom, but she couldn’t bear to be away from her newborn daughter during the week she returned to the office.
“I said to Mark, ‘I don’t think I want to go back to work. I want to watch her grow up,’ ” she recounts. “Fortunately, we were in a financial position that I didn’t have to go back to work. And so that’s what we did.”
Kim Roshanski
Kim Neeli and Husband
For the next decade, Neeli was a full-time stay-at-home mom as she and her husband welcomed three more kids. Still, something was missing in her life — she’d always jump at the opportunity, for instance, to use her law experience to write a letter or review a contract for her husband.
“I don’t know if I wrestled with the fact of not being an attorney, because to be frank, it wasn’t so great on a lot of the days,” she says. “But I did miss the intellectual component.”
When her youngest kid was starting preschool, Neeli had a newfound bit of free time. She didn’t want to dive back into the world of law because, after all, it was the stage she loved the most — the chance to perform for an audience. Though she always considered herself a private person, Neeli decided to scratch the itch by starting to post more regularly on social media.
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It started with posts about her wardrobe. But those were slow to catch on, so one day she gave a day-in-the-life vlog a try instead, and the post went viral. “Then I said, well, let me try a second one, and it worked,” she says. “It seemed to be the formula that brought me to where we are.”
Kim Roshanski
Kim Neeli and Family
Neeli is by no means the most famous influencer on Instagram — “listen, I’m not Becca Bloom,” she laughs, referencing the content creator known by millions of followers as the “Queen of RichTok” for showing off her lavish lifestyle.
But Neeli’s content also differs from that of Bloom’s. Even from her penthouse apartment, Neeli maintains that there’s a certain level of accessibility to the life she shows off: For every video from a box suite at the US Open, she has another where she’s giving her followers tips for putting together a fall outfit for under $35.
From as early as Neeli can remember, she’s loved to shop for affordable fashion; she gets a rush every time her outfits are mistaken for costing multiple times what she spent.
“I’m in a circle where there are a lot of women who are wearing all designer clothing,” she says. “I have the opportunity to walk right out of my doorstep on Fifth Avenue or 57th Street with all of these boutiques with Chanel and Prada and whatever else, and they inspire me. I don't need to spend $5,000 on a dress. I'm gonna find a dress that looks just like it. I'm gonna accessorize it nicely.”
Continues Neeli: “People come to my page for inspiration, motivation, fascination. And I think they stay because, once they get to really know who I am, they see that it's possible to interject beauty into so many different aspects of your life through little things. It’s creating extraordinary out of the ordinary.”
Neeli certainly gets her fair share of negative comments, and she says her husband always tells her she needs to trade sleep for her determination to respond to every single one.
“Honestly, I try to take a lot of the comments and teach my kids lessons from whatever I’ve learned,” she says. “If people are going to take the time to say something so hurtful to someone that they don’t know, it’s a reflection of what they’re going through.”
And she’s certainly a bit fed up with the question she gets most frequently: what her husband does for work that affords her family the luxe life that they lead. “I post a story that says, ‘Ask me anything,’ and nobody wants to know about me,” she says. “They just want to know about Mark.” (She declines to answer the question directly, instead calling her husband an “entrepreneur” with business dealings in “many things from finance to real estate.”)
Kim Roshanski
Kim Neeli and Family
So what keeps her going?
Neeli has a few different answers. For one, she likens the community she’s grown on the platform to friends. “They come to me for advice,” she says. “I’ve had someone tell me that she’s battling stage four cancer and that when she’s watching my videos, it gives her an escape.”
But Neeli also believes that her own page is a testament that anyone can emulate the same beauty she captures in her own life. She has a half-dozen aphorisms — which she admits may be a bit cheesy — to that very effect: “the destination is not nearly as beautiful if you don't have a journey to get there”; “you just have to take that one step forward and the rest will be history”; and “anybody can make their life a bit more beautiful” are a few.
“I don't know where this page is gonna go,” she says. “I don't know what it's going to turn into. I really don't. That being said, whatever it does turn into, I want it to be a legacy.”
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
