Under her Skims: inside Kim Kardashian’s $4bn apparel empire
Simply sign up to the Fashion myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox.
“I know exactly what I want.”
Kim Kardashian and I have been speaking for just over 90 seconds when she makes this declaration. We are sitting in the bone-white conference room of her creative headquarters in suburban Los Angeles, talking about Skims, the apparel brand she co-founded in 2019 with retail entrepreneurs Jens and Emma Grede, and today run by her and Jens. Grede, she clarifies, looks after the operations side of things as CEO. “I handle the visuals, all the ideas, fabrics, fits. I’m the face of this brand.”
She is wrapped in a cashmere shawl sweater over flowy Skims lounge pants; her middle-parted hair falls to her shoulders in a straight ebony curtain. Kardashian is smaller and more delicate than her fame’s gargantuan dimensions might lead you to imagine – a pocket Nefertiti, who speaks in a low, modulated voice, with a marked dearth of “like”s, “you know”s, and aimless pauses; nothing that might dilute the message. “I am shaping all of this,” she says.
Launched as an online direct-to-consumer business with a core offering of shapewear – an undergarment category that until recently was consigned to our mothers’ wardrobes – Skims has in five years proliferated into a full-blown apparel company (she prefers to call it “solutionswear”), with a market valuation of $4bn and pole position in the global pop-culture discourse. There are NBA and Team USA Olympics partnerships, and dozens of celebrity campaign stars; there have been high-vis pop-ups in Paris, LA and Dubai, and collaborations with Fendi and Swarovski. She has turned our impression of fusty, girdle-adjacent underthings on its head.
Skims today comprises tube dresses and T-shirts, string bikinis and sarongs, and a great deal more. The core is still undergarments, but they don’t look like granny’s knickers: high-rise, waist-sculpting thongs (from £18), lace-edged camis (£48), teardrop push-up plunge bras that conjure the décolletage of (for some of us, anyway) dreams (£60). There are multiple proprietary fabrics, including one called Fits Everybody that can stretch to twice its original size. All of it comes in a wide array of body-inclusive sizes and a vast spectrum of shades. New products “drop” almost weekly, teased in newsletters and on social media; waiting lists can swell to the many thousands. “Put her Skims on/Now she actin’ like she Kim,” rapped 21 Savage on the Drake track “More M’s” in 2022. Kardashian reposted it on her Instagram feed, accompanied by a photograph of herself wearing a metallic-silver Disco Long Sleeve Bodysuit, unzipped nearly to her navel.
Skims “has changed the way we look at the bodywear category, both as consumers and retailers”, says Judd Crane, executive buying director at Selfridges, which opened the first permanent Skims shop-in-shop outside the US in 2023. “It responds to customers’ desire for newness in intelligent, unexpected ways, blending solution-driven essentials with hot product and drop culture.” Claudia D’Arpizio, a senior partner at Bain & Company, cites its “unique value proposition, built around product features and continuous innovation. Its success is rooted in authenticity and inclusivity, which are reinforced by Kardashian’s influence.”
Last October a men’s underwear collection was launched – partly motivated, Kardashian tells me, by how many guys were low-key fans of the brand’s 2020 “Boyfriend” collection launch, which was in fact a stealth test collection (men reportedly accounted for as much as 12 per cent of its sales). Fronting the campaign are Neymar Jr, Jude Bellingham, NFL defensive lineman Nick Bosa and NBA superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. (A longtime Skims fan, the latter touts the brand’s “unique approach to creating a sense of real relatability”.) In June this year, the first standalone Skims boutique opened in Washington DC’s Georgetown, followed a few weeks later by a second in Miami and a third in Austin, Texas. A 2,000sq m flagship, designed by Rafael de Cardenas, will open on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan later this year.
All the heady expansion has been stoked by heady earnings: revenue in 2023 was nearly $713mn, up almost 45 per cent from the previous year, which itself was up a remarkable 80 per cent on 2021. Think what you will about Kardashian – and if you have a television or a smartphone (or even a pulse), you probably have an opinion about her – Skims’s numbers back the fact that she can move the business needle. Not bad for someone whose peripatetic professional trajectory has included stints as a closet organiser (for her childhood friend Paris Hilton); unwitting reality-TV star (that notorious 2000s sex tape, made with R&B artist Ray J); very witting reality-TV star (Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which ran for a whopping 20 seasons), and aspiring beauty mogul (KKW Beauty, the faltering make-up brand she launched in 2017, has recently been rebranded SKKN).
All this and legal apprenticeship too; she passed the California “baby” bar exam for first-year law students in 2021, and makes regular appearances advocating for criminal justice reform.
“Kim’s influence is undeniable; she is one of one,” says Nick Brown, a co-founder along with Natalie Massenet of Imaginary Ventures, which participated in the circa-$330mn Series C funding round last year that propelled Skims to its current valuation. “But she is more than the face of the brand; she’s a genuine entrepreneur. I would place her among the top one per cent of founders I’ve had the privilege to meet.”
As impressive as the valuation is how Skims has come to be one of retail’s cultural bellwethers, an ongoing must-see show of its own. Selfridges’ Crane praises the brand’s “market-leading approach to collaborations, campaigns, and talent, and its knack for being one step ahead”. Kardashian has leveraged her own fame (her Instagram following, at 360mn people, is more than five times the population of the UK) to make her brand the one in which all the other superstars want to play a part.
“Skims exists at the intersection of culture and commerce,” says Grede, drawing an aspirational parallel between it and the Nike of the 1990s: “High-performing product, delivering real value for money, and a brand and a company that always had a voice in what was happening in the world.”
“Kim’s work ethic is hardcore and that’s cool to me, but it’s also very clear to me that she understands her position within culture in a way that so many other people in the public eye just don’t,” says Charli XCX, whom Skims enlisted in August to front a new campaign, fresh off the British pop singer’s own Brat-fuelled viral explosion. Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan’s Skims turn broadly coincided with the airing of an episode containing a six-minute-long, world-news-making sex scene. Coughlan describes it as “the perfect collaboration. I admire the way Skims pushes creative boundaries; Kim and her team have done an incredible job promoting inclusivity through their products. I’m really proud of this campaign.”
Kardashian loves it when fate conspires to create these “absolutely random” but serendipitous moments. “I really wanted [NFL quarterback] Patrick Mahomes and his family [for the Skims Christmas 2023 campaign]. Of course, we didn’t know the Chiefs were going to make it to the Super Bowl right afterward; and then Nick Bosa [who plays for the San Franciso 49ers] was in it too. And then with Usher performing…” All too good.
Her inspirations talent-wise come “from everything I love watching, being a part of”. Sport, she notes, is the new cultural unifier. “Athletes are aspirational; they’re role models, and [with watching them] comes that feeling of being part of something”, which chimes neatly with the Skims manifesto.
“I take my kids to a soccer game, and I get inspired by a player that my son loves,” she says, referring to eight-year-old Saint, whom she shares with Ye, the recording artist/serial provocateur formerly known as Kanye West; they divorced in 2022. “My daughter North [is] into the NBA and the WNBA. The White Lotus” – whose season-two breakout stars Simona Tabasco and Bea Granno were the faces of the 2023 Valentine’s Day campaign – “was the hottest show at the time. I don’t think that [other brands] would necessarily have chosen those two girls; they weren’t huge main characters. But I love a little bit of unexpected.” She smiles. “Or a lot of unexpected.”
“We see the brand kind of like a magazine cover,” says Grede. (They aren’t the only ones: “Are Skims campaigns the new Vogue covers?” read an April 2024 headline on the pop-culture site Vox.) “We’re always trying to excite one another, and ourselves. Like a lot of things we do, the starting point with talent usually feels intuitive.”
“I always thought shapewear was cool, because I had no choice,” says Kardashian. We’re still in the calm confines of her meeting room. In the hangar-like studio next door, Tyla’s “Water” plays on the sound system; the film crew from The Kardashians (her family’s latest reality-TV foray), having captured bits of her and performance artist and photographer Vanessa Beecroft in action for HTSI’s shoot, is digging into the huge lunch spread that a craft services team has laid out on the open kitchen’s travertine island. “I developed really young. And I had a sister who would make fun of me, so I was always insecure,” Kardashian continues. “When I would wear shapewear, it made me feel really good, like a ’50s pin-up girl. I wanted to make it as glamorous as I felt like it should be.”
Skims shows that glamour with a wide spectrum of body types, races, shades, and abilities. This inclusivity stems in part from Kardashian’s own experience. “When I was in my early 20s, there was only one colour of shapewear, and it was this sort of light… it was not an actual skin tone, basically, but anyway it was a lot lighter than my skin. So I used to put my things in the sink and add tea bags or coffee to try to get the perfect realistic colour. I couldn’t really wear a new dress without something underneath it, to hold me up. So I had to dye them myself.”
“With Kim, shapewear was always this very particular, personal thing,” says Beecroft, who has worked with Kardashian since the brand’s early days. “It’s amazing how she used it [when she was young]; she would cut it, she would put duct tape on it, she would wrap it. It was so creative and particular to her life, and that part of her became the whole brand.” Now “everyone I know wears Skims,” says Beecroft. “Art collectors, my daughter’s friends.”
The road to success hasn’t been devoid of missteps. The brand’s original name, for example, Kimono, was immediately pilloried for its cultural insensitivity. (Grede executed a nimble teaching-moment mea culpa for the press.) The Ultimate Nipple Bra – you get the gist – launched in late 2023, with much made of the 10 per cent of proceeds that would go to combat global warming. But it managed to fall foul of a handful of climate-crisis organisations, thanks to a flippant video in which Kardashian cosplays a sex-bomb climate scientist (among her lines: “Unlike the icebergs, these aren’t going anywhere”).
Each blip has passed at the speed of pop culture; a pace that Kardashian and Skims have helped to set. But rumours that an IPO is being contemplated in-house have been buzzing steadily through the industry. If they’re true, the wider sustainability conversation – provenance of materials, workers’ compensation, the environmental ramifications of production – is one that the company will want to get out in front of. “Investors and consumers are prioritising ethical and sustainable practices,” says Bain’s D’Arpizio. “For a company leveraging celebrity influence, aligning with these values can enhance its reputation.” She notes that Skims “may not have had a strong sustainability record in the past; but recent partnerships to address this are promising”.
When queried about sustainability initiatives, Kardashian politely but firmly declines to discuss the subject, referring me to Grede instead. “It’s very much top of mind, and it’s not something we’re trying to figure out on our own,” he tells me. Skims’s ESG partners include SuperCircle, a reverse logistics platform that tracks and powers recycling, and Watershed, to measure and mitigate carbon output (the brand’s commitment is to reduce scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 42 per cent by 2030). The company is also working on a full accreditation with the Fair Labor Association, of which it is already a member.
As for the IPO buzz: Kardashian again refers me to Grede. “Great companies have great options. [One that’s] in the public eye, with public institutional investors, deserves to be a public company” is his tease, followed by an elegant evasion: “Our previous successes allow us the luxury of time and making the right decisions.”
Meanwhile, there’s a feel-good, fits-every-body product line to produce, and The Culture to keep making. And where is the brand’s face headed? “Coming for so long from a place of saying yes to anything and everything, in all different spaces of beauty and retail, and just wanting to be the face of so many things,” Kardashian says now she’s focused on the business. “Yeah, not even so much being the face. Just running my brand.”
Kim Kardashian’s stylist, Soki Mac at A-Frame Agency. Jens Grede’s stylist, Simon Robins. Hair, Dimitris Giannetos at Opus Beauty. Make-up, Rokael Lizama at Opus Beauty. Manicure, Diem Truong using Madam Glam and Brittney Boyce, both at Star Touch Agency. Set design, Despoina Damaskou. Lighting technician, Gray Hamner. Stylist’s assistants, Jack Wilson and William Thomas. Tailoring, Seung Kim. Special thanks to Elettra Beecroft
Letter in response to this article:
Kardashian’s skim reading / From Gillian Fenwick, Toronto, ON, Canada
Comments