SKIMS’ chilling vision of the perfect female body

Kim Kardashian loves a gimmick. When her shapewear brand SKIMS launched the “Ultimate Bush” last week — a stringy, $32 micro-thong with a fake tuft of pubic hair — it was seemingly more rage-bait than genuine release. SKIMS teased the product with a tongue-in-cheek game show-inspired campaign called “Does the Carpet Match the Drapes?” as critics flocked to social media to weigh in. People called the launch “weird” and “uncalled for” in the Instagram comments. But the hairy, barely-there panties sold out within a day.

Since the billionaire entrepreneur founded SKIMS in 2019, this year, Kardashian has begun doing something different with the brand, pushing the proverbial envelope into more provocative territory and dabbling in the polarizing end of bodywear. In August, she launched a $48 collagen-infused face wrap that promised to “snatch your little chinny-chin-chin” and looked like a prop that came straight out of a horror movie. This was after she launched a fake BBL butt pad in February, and in May, a bra with fake perfect nipples, plus a version that was pierced. These drops, from an optimist’s standpoint, could be viewed as harmless schemes for the brand to stoke controversy and stay relevant in fast-moving press cycles. But more and more I’m unable to ignore an underlying insidiousness beneath it all as Kardashian builds, and sells, her vision of the perfect female body one part at a time.

Kardashian’s aforementioned merkin might not be for the functionally minded, but the drop can’t be disentangled from the wider context of the Kardashian empire and past: that the multihyphenate, along with her famous sisters, are known for setting and cementing beauty standards into the mainstream.

At the height of the Kardashian cultural reign in the mid-2010s, the sisters held disproportionate power over certain beauty aesthetics, many of which appropriated from Black culture. Even as recent beauty trends have brought back the “heroin chic” look, that pivot was only noted by trend forecasters online after people speculated that Kim and Khloe got “butt reductions” in 2022. Kardashian, whether we like it or not, are conscious of it or not, and despite all the controversy she courts, continues to overwhelmingly shape the way society thinks about the ideal female body. And now, as a CEO of a shapewear company, there’s something deeply unsettling about the idea of Kardashian utilizing that influence to now sell those “features” back to those they were taken from.

Through SKIMS, her influence is now more measurable and clearly defined than ever. Each gimmick item that she releases and immediately sells out proves her ability to move things from the niche to the mainstream. In the instance of the merkin, she’s repackaging body hair that women have historically been shamed for, that women have paid hundreds of dollars to permanently remove. But now, that same untamed growth is a novelty that you can buy for a pretty penny. Kardashian has found a way to commercialize the body parts that most often fall victim to regulation, sexualization, and scrutiny in a patriarchal society, while removing them from their previous context completely.

Speaking to Ruby Thelot, a professor of design and media theory at NYU, he describes the SKIMS endeavor as appropriating body parts for a “self-made Frankenstein image — in which they’re taking the lips of one, the eyes of another, the butt of another… it means that we are in a highly visual culture where we can take things that are deemed highly negative, but by decorticating them from their original bodies where they exist, we can have them as almost meaningless symbols that only exist in the form of an image.”

In that way, there’s nothing empowering or daring about Kardashian’s products or gimmicks. How can the shapewear mogul tell us that our natural bodies are en vogue via faux-bushes while simultaneously selling us tummy-sucking waist trainers and face-slimming bandages? Then, when Kardashian releases statements that she found the reactions to her fake bush “funny,” I feel gaslit for even venting frustration at her never-ending rolodex of absurd concepts.

Time and again through the backlash, I remind myself that the Kardashians are here merely for financial and social gain. That they have the best plastic surgeons and dermatologists at their disposal while we sit in our modest abodes clamoring at our keyboards to dissect the impact of their latest controversy. Let us remember that celebrities are only as powerful as the attention and money that fuel them, even though I know that’s easier said than done.