‘The world is so chaotic,’ says Kim Kardashian over the phone from LA, ‘so I always wanted my home to feel really simple and warm’. In the world according to Kardashian, chaos is evidently a condition best answered with beige. The colour has become as central to her iconography as her hourglass silhouette, appearing in oatmeal, mushroom, taupe, sand and innumerable other shades that exist somewhere between skin and stone. In her new Skims flagship on London’s Regent Street, this familiar palette has been expanded into architecture. Pale walls curve around the space; surfaces appear continuous and almost seamless; a monumental female nude sculpture by Vanessa Beecroft presides with the authority of an ancient fertility goddess.
The store is grand, but in the service of distinctly intimate items: underwear, T-shirts, socks and the concealed scaffolding worn beneath a dress. There is an amusing disproportion between the monumentality of the space and the private, sometimes ungainly act at the centre of it. Pulling on shapewear is rarely an elegant procedure. It involves tugging, contortion and the fear that one may never fully emerge from it, at least metaphorically speaking. Skims has housed this negotiation between flesh and elastic within something akin to a temple. That scale is not accidental. The London flagship, designed by New York-based architect Rafael de Cárdenas – who is no stranger to minimalism, having begun his career at Calvin Klein in the 1990s – represents the fullest physical expression yet of a brand that began in Kardashian’s home. Founded in 2019, Skims’ earliest fittings took place in Kardashian’s closet, and campaigns were photographed in her hallways. ‘We were just doing everything at home all the time,’ she says. ‘And I wanted that to come off in the physical stores.’
So, rather than the brand’s design language being manufactured retrospectively by an agency, instead it emerged from the places where the products were developed and from Kardashian’s already intensely codified way of living. ‘People seemed to like this clean, monochromatic aesthetic,’ she says. ‘I wanted as much of the materiality from my home in the store, so it would still feel like it was part of that.’
Kim Kardashian photographed at her Los Angeles Skims store in front of a 12ft sculpture by Vanessa Beecroft, with whom she frequently collaborates
Kardashian’s house, created in collaboration with Belgian designer Axel Vervoordt, is one of the most documented private interiors of the social media and reality TV age. Its vast planes of pale plaster have been photographed so frequently, they are no longer particularly private. Empty, monastic and almost suspiciously uncluttered, the rooms resemble a luxury retreat designed for someone who has transcended the need for possessions, despite their owner being among one of the most accomplished merchants of material desire.
Kardashian is aware that minimalism can easily become a euphemism for emotional vacancy. ‘People can feel like, because it is so minimal, it might not be warm,’ she says. The challenge, both at home and in the stores, was to preserve the calm while creating some suggestion of human temperature. ‘We’ve managed to add that warmth back into it.’ The contradiction is pure Kardashian. She is an avatar of maximal exposure who prefers minimal interiors; she is synonymous with conspicuous consumption but her aesthetic language is one of subtraction; she has made the body spectacular by foregrounding everything required to control it.
For nearly two decades, Kardashian’s body has occupied a disproportionate amount of cultural space. It has been desired, derided, moralised over, surgically debated and replicated through clothing, exercise, filters and cosmetic intervention. It helped to dethrone the attenuated, adolescent figure of the 2000s, replacing it with a new ideal based on dramatic curvature. Yet, as with anything relating to the female body, it also produced its own set of tyrannies.
Kardashian’s most consequential intervention was not the introduction of a particular silhouette, but her insistence that the work of producing it should no longer be hidden. She dissolved the old conspiracy of beauty, in which famous women maintained their appearance was the incidental result of water, sleep and a few drops of moisturiser. In the Kardashian universe, beauty requires an almost bureaucratic devotion to maintenance through fittings, lighting, hair extensions, shapewear, cosmetic procedures and the like.
‘People seemed to like this clean, monochromatic aesthetic. I wanted as much of the materiality from my home in the store’
Kim Kardashian
‘I love shapewear,’ she says. ‘I have cellulite, I feel insecure, and I want to wear something that makes me feel good about myself and snatched inside my clothes.’ She doesn’t pretend that a compression garment resolves the insecurity. She is interested in what it enables her to do despite it. ‘It’s how it makes me feel when I wear something and I’m leaving the house. I’ve always owned up to my shit, no matter what.’
This is Kardashian at her most compelling: honest about artifice, not entirely secure, but unwilling to treat insecurity as a private shame. She doesn’t argue that the body must remain untouched to be authentic. Instead, the self is something one can continually edit without regarding the original as a failure.
Skims transformed that proposition into a global business. Shapewear had previously belonged to a faintly mortifying category of garments: corrective, medicalised and redolent of girdles sold in department store basements. ‘Granny knickers’, as they were once known, they presented a stark contrast to the skimpy lacy lingerie sold in dimly lit, boudoir-like boutiques. Their purpose was to conceal themselves along with the bodily irregularities they had been enlisted to suppress. Kardashian made the category aspirational. ‘When I started a shapewear brand, it wasn’t popular,’ she says. ‘People associated it with a girdle type. I wanted to flip that and make them feel sexy in it.’
To own one’s insecurity is not necessarily to escape it. Skims speaks the contemporary language of self-acceptance while selling garments designed to compress, smooth, lift and rearrange the body. It welcomes the body as it is, then offers to improve its lines. This is less a hypocrisy and more an accurate description of today’s cultural climate of self-optimisation. We are encouraged to love ourselves unconditionally while treating ourselves as an ongoing renovation.
‘It was important to me to have a wide variety of skin tones,’ says Kardashian, who at Skims is rethinking the universal ‘nude’
Skims succeeds because it understands that contradiction rather than attempting to resolve it. In November 2025, the company raised $225m at a $5bn valuation and said it was on course to exceed $1bn in annual net sales. It was, by then, no longer an unusually successful celebrity side project, but a substantial apparel business with ambitions to expand further into physical retail, beauty, activewear and international markets.
De Cárdenas says that the product’s commercial credibility was apparent when his studio began researching the company. Skims was offering quality at a relatively reasonable price, he says, while nevertheless communicating aspiration. ‘It validated the project,’ he says, with the pragmatism of an architect who has presumably encountered more than one luxurious environment built around something less persuasive.
The brand’s most significant departure from the old lingerie industry has been its rethinking of ‘nude’. Before Skims, the term often meant a single, pallid beige: the colour of one person’s skin promoted as a universal absence of colour. Kardashian recalls finding underwear in arbitrary nude colours, too light or too pink to disappear beneath the clothes of most women.
‘It was important to me to have a wide variety of skin tones,’ she says. This now sounds obvious, as all successful cultural corrections eventually do. Yet the commercial lingerie industry maintained the fiction of a universal Caucasian flesh tone for decades. While Skims did not invent inclusive sizing or diverse casting, it brought both into the mainstream with the force of Kardashian’s image-making apparatus.
‘I have cellulite, I feel insecure, and I want to wear something that makes me feel good about myself’
Kim Kardashian
Its campaigns have also become exercises in cultural timing. Sabrina Carpenter made her Skims debut in 2024, just as her transition from former Disney performer to pop’s reigning confection was accelerating; Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan followed during the fever surrounding the show’s third season; and Rosé fronted its 2025 Valentine’s Day campaign as the Blackpink singer’s solo career reached a new pitch of global visibility.
More recently, Will Ferrell appeared in character as fictional pro golfer Lonnie ‘The Hawk’ Hawkins, wearing white briefs, a vest and an expression of unearned masculine confidence. The joke was not that he possessed the wrong body for underwear advertising, but that the conventions of underwear advertising were overdue for ridicule. De Cárdenas sees that playfulness as evidence that Skims has begun to acquire an identity beyond Kardashian herself.
In its early years, she appeared in almost every campaign; now the brand is popular enough to withstand her absence. Casting an intentionally ordinary or comic male figure, he argues, is ‘very different from what anyone else in this space is doing’. Traditional intimate apparel sells sex and the idealised body. ‘Skims is aware of that, but I don’t think it’s the aim,’ he says. Its proposition is closer to ‘empowerment of the self ’.
Kardashian describes the desired effect as ‘comfortable, but safe and sexy’. Traditional lingerie advertising dictated the terms of sexiness with exhausting certainty, offering a narrow performance of feminine availability, usually directed towards an implied heterosexual male spectator. Skims is not devoid of eroticism, but its sensuality is more self-contained. As a result, the Skims store feels very different from the conventional lingerie boutique. There is little red satin, no suggestion of the bordello and none of the coy, faux-French vocabulary through which women were once expected to purchase panties. The environment is closer to a contemporary art gallery or wellness space.
The exterior of the new Skims store on London’s Regent Street, which marks the first standalone store from the brand in the UK
Says Kardashian, ‘I want people to feel this is their safe space,’ somewhere they can find ‘the most comfortable underwear, the best-fitting bras’ and shapewear made with materials that she has helped to develop. ‘It seems like a really simple concept, but I want people to feel good in their skin.’ It is a simplicity that would sound banal were it not also an extremely effective business proposition. Skims is not selling the dramatic transformation promised by date-night lingerie. It is selling the smaller, more repeatable pleasure of feeling fractionally better equipped to face the everyday.
She speaks of visiting the store as ‘your little time to be selfish’: a moment away from children, work or other obligations, when the customer buys something for herself. That idea of private attention is built into the architecture, particularly the fitting rooms. De Cárdenas describes them as intimate but also stage-like, recognising that trying on clothes has changed in the age of the front-facing camera. ‘When you try on clothes, you take a photo with a selfie,‘ he says. With shapewear, which is intended to alter how the body appears, the impulse to photograph oneself is even more pronounced. The rooms, therefore, needed to offer intimacy while allowing the customer to feel ‘foregrounded’.
A customer no longer looks only into a mirror – she photographs herself in it. The fitting room has become both private chamber and miniature production studio. This feels especially prescient for a brand whose aspiration derives from Kardashian, who hasn’t merely inhabited the camera’s gaze but learnt to redirect it. Having published a book of selfies with Rizzoli in 2015, she is acutely aware her image is not simply consumed; it is produced, managed and circulated with remarkable discipline.
The store borrows that same sense of control. Kardashian may not speak in the technical dialect of architecture, but de Cárdenas describes her as discerning and unusually decisive. During their first call, she was able to approve and dismiss references within minutes. ‘She’s very efficient,’ he says, ‘quick to know what she likes and doesn’t like, even if she doesn’t know the terminology.’
‘I want people to feel this is their safe space’
Kim Kardashian
Kardashian became involved in detailed discussions about everything from the baseboards and shadowed reveals between walls and ceilings to the exact tone of greige. She chose de Cárdenas, she says, because he immediately appeared to speak the same ‘architectural language’. ‘His materiality, everything that he was presenting – it just felt like exactly what I was looking for.’
At the centre of the London store, Beecroft’s enormous female figure makes its bodily logic explicit. Kardashian has worked with the Italian artist for years, and her sculptures have become central to the architecture of Skims just as much as her photography has to its campaigns. They possess the authority of classical statuary, but their bodies are softer, stranger and less purified than the marble gods of antiquity. ‘There’s this type of fluidity [to her work], from the style lines and the curves of the logo into the fits of the shapewear and the body,’ says Kardashian, who was adamant that this softness should continue into the environment. ‘I didn’t want sharp edges. I wanted everything to feel soft. Whimsical.’
For de Cárdenas, the Beecroft figure works because it simultaneously summons classical sculpture and resists perfectionist tendencies. ‘It’s not necessarily an idealised body,’ he says. ‘It’s a sort of real woman’s body.’ Enlarged to a monumental scale, it becomes both artwork and surrogate customer: the body not hidden apologetically in a changing room but given the spatial authority to organise the building around itself. Few of the store’s walls are actually curved. Instead, several large gestures establish a bodily softness that is echoed throughout the space. ‘All 90-degree corners are kind of filleted and radiused,’ says de Cárdenas. ‘It’s meant to mimic the softness of the body. The body doesn’t have these rigid, linear edges.’
‘If the whole thing feels curvy, then that’s successful,’ he adds, acknowledging the more prosaic fact that no retail budget, even a Kardashian one, permits every wall to undulate. Two large curved moments create an impression that the remainder of the space is able to borrow from. The store is also an index of Skims’ expansion. Much of the ground floor is devoted not to shapewear but to apparel and seasonal collections; the foundation garments on which the company was built largely occupy the upper level. There are dedicated areas for menswear and Nike Skims, alongside two banks of fitting rooms.
The 6,500 sq ft Skims Chicago store, in the city’s Gold Coast neighbourhood, was also designed by Rafael de Cárdenas and is anchored by a reclining Vanessa Beecroft sculpture
The entry itself is a calculated departure. ‘It shows less product than any of the other stores right off the bat,’ notes de Cárdenas. It is, he says, ‘an interesting experiment’: the most recognisably luxurious area is also the least encumbered by things to buy.
The architecture also operates on the senses beyond sight. Kardashian describes meeting perfumers who formulate aromas for spaces rather than fragrances to be worn on the skin: the smell of a room, a hotel or even a new car. A subtle, proprietary scent was developed to warm the minimal interior. ‘It could be just that subtle scent,’ she says, ‘but we’ve really dived into every detail to make it feel warm and its own experience.’ The customer may never identify the aroma consciously; it registers instead as an unplaceable feeling that this environment is unlike the one next door.
This is precisely de Cárdenas’ measure of success. ‘I don’t think we want anyone to notice any details at first,’ he says. ‘If people walk away enjoying the experience and not being able to point to why, then I think it’s worked.’ The project is about ‘engendering atmosphere more than anything’.
In hindsight, Kardashian has always been an effective translator of elite taste. She takes aesthetics that might otherwise remain confined to galleries, private houses and inner fashion circles, strips them of their obscurity and sends them back into popular culture. This process inevitably flattens certain meanings, but it also creates new ones. What begins as Belgian minimalism or performance art ends as the visual language of bras sold to millions of people.
‘All 90-degree corners are kind of filleted and radiused. It’s meant to mimic the softness of the body’
Rafael de Cárdenas
This may be her most enduring cultural talent. She doesn’t invent every idea she popularises, but she understands which ideas are ready to become mass desire. She is less of a muse than a distribution system. De Cárdenas describes her as both a ‘hugely mythological figure’ and ‘just a normal girl from California’. The tension between those two identities has always powered the Kardashian enterprise. Her life is fantastical, and yet the banalities of it have long been subject to fly-on-the-wall reality TV.
Perhaps Kardashian’s greatest legacy is that her world does not ask us to choose between loving the body and altering it. It assumes we will do both. ‘I feel I’ve always been not the most secure,’ she says. ‘But as I gained confidence, I wanted to exude that in a brand, and to help others feel the same.’
And perhaps that is the true architecture of Skims: not the curved walls or carefully calibrated greige, but a structure of feeling in which insecurity is neither conquered nor concealed. Just like the woman herself, it is a thoroughly contemporary contradiction.
A version of this article appears in the September 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.