Kim Kardashian’s Skims has no business being this good
Kim Kardashian’s billion-dollar brand inspires strong opinions. Its underwear, however, is surprisingly difficult to dismiss.
Initially drawn in by curiosity, the writer found Skims’ menswear surprisingly difficult to fault. (Illustration: CNA/Jasper Loh)
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There are some things you don’t admit to easily. Voting for the wrong party. Crying on the plane while watching the final Downton Abbey movie. Owning, and genuinely loving, a pair of Skims underwear.
And yet here I am.
It started innocuously, as these things do – a late-night online scroll that somehow migrated from research for a hotel review I was supposed to be writing to Skims.com, where six-packed men in barely-there briefs gazed at me with the serene confidence of people who have never, not once, worried about their carb intake.
What struck me first wasn’t the bodies. It was Skims’ range. The men’s offering isn’t a token gesture, a few styles quietly tacked onto a women’s brand to tick a demographic box. It’s a full casual wardrobe: underwear, tees, hoodies, sweatshirts, shorts, trousers, pyjamas. The sizing runs the full human spectrum of body shapes and sizes. Someone had clearly asked, sincerely, what men actually need from a brand like this, and then gone away and made it.
Figuring I had nothing to lose, I bought the cotton boxer briefs. I told no one. At US$46 (S$59) for a pack of three, the price point sits in that comfortable middle territory – not cheap enough to be forgettable, not expensive enough to require justification. They arrived within two weeks in a rugged, discreetly branded box. Then the customer service happened: a query answered the same day, a follow-up email – unprompted – checking everything had arrived well. In an era when most brands treat post-purchase contact as an inconvenience to be routed through seventeen automated menus, Skims wrote back as a real person (I think) with an actual name.
The underwear itself? Quelle surprise. The cuts are genuinely good – engineered, it seems, for real bodies rather than the specific subspecies that lives on soft-core campaign imagery. The fabric is soft in a way that prompts mild existential reflection about every pair of underwear preceding it. Nothing revolutionary. No Pima cotton provenance story, no sustainably sourced anything. Just a mid-weight cotton blend that has clearly been developed with genuine attention to weight, stretch and recovery.
The result is underwear that’s well-made, well-fitted. And so comfortable. Sure, I look nothing like the models. The models look nothing like me. But we have reached a detente, the models and I, and we’re managing beautifully, thanks for asking.
Since then, I have acquired a set of tank tops and boxers. The through-line across everything is the same: these are functional clothes which do precisely what they are supposed to do and absolutely nothing else. No attention-seeking hardware, no decorative excess, no frills of any kind – which is both quietly surprising and a small act of brand subversion. After all, the Kardashian industrial complex has never been associated with restraint, yet, somehow, the clothes are.
This is, of course, the part where I’m supposed to acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is that the woman behind all this is one of the most polarising figures alive. A person about whom opinions are essentially pre-formed and immovable, like Wolverine’s adamantine skeleton. Or a mother-in-law’s views on your curtains.
The facts, though, are facts. Kim Kardashian became a billionaire in 2021 and Forbes estimates her net worth at US$1.9 billion, the bulk of it tied to her ownership stake in Skims, which completed a US$225 million funding round in late 2025. Annual net sales have crossed US$1 billion. There are now over a dozen retail stores across the US. There is, improbably, a Nike partnership – hey, NikeSkims – positioning the brand in performance activewear alongside one of the most recognisable names in sport. This is not a celebrity candle business. This is a serious commercial enterprise, and Goldman Sachs is writing the cheques.
It began with controversy. The original name – Kimono, announced in 2019 – set off a cultural appropriation firestorm so swift and noisy that it made the internet’s collective attention span look positively glacial. The immediate rebrand – within six days, before most people had finished being outraged – was not just damage control. Skims is, frankly, the better name. It’s sharp, clean, scalable, memorable. It also gets out of the way of the product and lets the product speak for itself.
Someone asked me recently whether I thought Kim Kardashian actually designs any of it. I paused, mainly because I find the question revealing in what it assumes. Karl Lagerfeld was creative director of Chanel for over three decades, yet I have never seen a photograph of him holding a pair of scissors, much less sew a hem. Alexander McQueen, who did cut fabric – masterfully, obsessively, with a genius that was frightening – was the exception, not the rule. What great creative directors provide is the eye: the relentless, calibrated, commercially intelligent gaze that determines what gets made, how it’s positioned, and why it matters.
Kim Kardashian, whatever else one thinks of her, has that gaze. She has always had it. She has also, it turns out, co-founded a company from scratch that reached a US$5 billion valuation in six years. That isn’t luck wearing a bodysuit. That’s razor-sharp business acumen.
The sister comparison is worth noting. Kylie Jenner’s net worth sits at around $670 million – impressive by any human measure, but shy of the billionaire threshold that Forbes once bestowed, and then coldly withdrew. Two siblings from the same household building fortunes at that scale, from personal brands rather than inherited capital, remains both statistically improbable and impressive regardless of what one thinks of the family doing it.
In the end, the most subversive thing about Skims is how little it needs you to think about Kim Kardashian. You just wear it. For a brand built entirely on a person’s name, that’s no small achievement.
Meanwhile, my regular life goes on, which involves no sign of a six-pack and considerably more Skims in the drawer. They are, without question, the best-fitting clothes I have worn in a long time. I have told exactly one other person and he bought two packs. Word travels slowly when nobody wants to admit they’re the one who started it.
Source: CNA/bt
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