Building Brand Identity Through Material Language: Skims Translates Domestic Interiors Into Retail Architecture

From Private Residence to Public Retail

Most fashion brands construct their spatial identity retrospectively, hiring agencies to manufacture a design language that feels coherent across touchpoints. The trajectory of Skims has followed the opposite path. When the brand launched in 2019, product development happened inside closets, and early campaign photography took place in hallways. That domestic origin has shaped its architectural expression in ways that resist the typical codes of intimate apparel retail.

Rafael de Cárdenas, the New York architect behind the Regent Street flagship, inherited a brief that prioritized continuity with residential interiors rather than departure from them. His design translates the pale plaster planes and monochromatic surfaces of Kardashian's Los Angeles home into a retail environment, maintaining the same material restraint while accommodating the functional demands of a store. The result is a space that reads simultaneously as gallery, wellness retreat, and changing room, deliberately avoiding the velvet-draped boudoir vocabulary that has long dominated lingerie retail.

The scale is deliberately monumental. A twelve-foot sculpture by Vanessa Beecroft anchors the interior, imbuing the space with the gravitas of a museum installation. Yet the products on display are fundamentally modest: undergarments, T-shirts, compression garments designed to be worn beneath other clothing. That disproportion between architectural scale and product intimacy is intentional, framing the unglamorous act of pulling on shapewear within an environment that suggests ritual rather than correction.

Material Continuity as Brand Strategy

Kardashian's residential aesthetic has been extensively documented, its vast expanses of pale plaster photographed so frequently that the interior has become a kind of public monument to private restraint. That aesthetic carries specific associations: transcendence of clutter, emotional detachment, the ascetic discipline required to maintain surfaces free of visible life. De Cárdenas faced the challenge of translating that visual language into a commercial context without sacrificing the sense of warmth that makes retail environments inviting.

His solution relies on tactile variation within a narrow chromatic range. Surfaces curve rather than meet at hard angles, creating a sense of enclosure that softens the minimalism. The palette extends through oatmeal, mushroom, taupe, and sand, shades that exist somewhere between skin and stone. This is not the stark white minimalism of modernist orthodoxy but a warmer iteration, one that acknowledges the body as the ultimate referent for colour.

The materiality serves a dual function. It establishes visual continuity with the brand's origin story, reinforcing the narrative that Skims emerged from lived domestic space rather than corporate strategy. But it also differentiates the brand from competitors who have historically sold intimate apparel through environments coded as overtly sexual: dim lighting, red satin, the faux-French vocabulary of "lingerie boutiques." Skims occupies a different register, closer to the calm authority of a spa or meditation studio.

Shapewear and the Architecture of Self-Presentation

The category Skims operates within has historically been defined by shame. Shapewear belonged to the basement departments of mid-century retailers, sold alongside prosthetics and medical garments. The products promised correction, and their purpose was to disappear beneath clothing along with the bodily irregularities they compressed. The language was clinical, the aesthetic apologetic.

Kardashian's intervention was to treat shapewear as infrastructure rather than secret. She acknowledged the labour required to produce a particular silhouette and refused to pretend that maintenance was effortless. That transparency extended to the material itself: Skims garments are engineered for performance, but they are also photographed, discussed, and sold as desirable objects rather than shameful necessities.

De Cárdenas argues that this shift is evident in the fitting rooms, which he describes as both intimate and stage-like. The design acknowledges that trying on clothes has been transformed by the front-facing camera. Customers photograph themselves in mirrors, evaluating how garments alter their appearance before making purchase decisions. The fitting rooms needed to provide privacy while also allowing the wearer to feel foregrounded, lit in a way that flatters without distorting.

This is a fundamentally different proposition from traditional lingerie retail, which sold garments as tools for seduction, aimed at an implied heterosexual male spectator. Skims garments are designed to be seen, but the intended audience is the wearer herself. The architecture reflects that shift, creating spaces that feel contemplative rather than performative.

Inclusive Sizing and the Problem of "Nude"

Before Skims, the term "nude" in intimate apparel typically referred to a single pale beige, a colour that matched almost no one's skin yet was marketed as universal. The fiction persisted for decades, reinforced by an industry that treated Caucasian flesh tone as the default absence of colour. Kardashian's decision to offer a wide range of skin-tone options now sounds obvious, the kind of correction that seems inevitable in retrospect. Yet the commercial lingerie industry resisted it for years.

The brand's campaigns have amplified that inclusivity through casting. Rather than relying exclusively on professional models, Skims has featured performers at strategic moments in their careers: Sabrina Carpenter during her transition from Disney star to pop musician, Nicola Coughlan amid the cultural fever surrounding Bridgerton's third season, Rosé as her solo career gained momentum. More recently, Will Ferrell appeared in character as a fictional golfer, wearing briefs and an expression of unearned masculine confidence. The joke was not that his body was wrong for underwear advertising, but that the conventions of underwear advertising were overdue for satire.

De Cárdenas sees that playfulness as evidence that Skims has begun to acquire an identity independent of its founder. In its early years, Kardashian appeared in nearly every campaign. Now the brand can withstand her absence, a sign of institutional maturity. The casting strategy reflects a broader shift in how intimate apparel is sold: not as a promise of sexual transformation, but as a tool for self-management.

Retail as Refuge

Kardashian describes the store as a "safe space," a phrase that carries specific connotations in contemporary discourse. She means it as a place where customers can find garments that fit, made from materials developed to perform specific functions: compression, smoothing, lifting. The language is pragmatic, focused on problem-solving rather than fantasy.

That pragmatism has translated into substantial commercial success. In November 2025, Skims raised $225 million at a $5 billion valuation, with annual net sales projected to exceed $1 billion. The company has expanded beyond its initial product category into activewear, beauty, and international markets, no longer a celebrity side project but a significant apparel business with ambitions to build a global retail presence.

De Cárdenas notes that the product's credibility was immediately apparent when his studio began research. Skims offered quality at a reasonable price while maintaining aspirational positioning, a balance that validated the architectural investment. The brand is not selling dramatic transformation or the promise of a different life. It is selling the smaller, more repeatable pleasure of feeling fractionally better equipped to face daily obligations.

The Contradiction at the Core

There is an inherent tension in Skims that the architecture both reveals and accommodates. The brand speaks the language of self-acceptance while selling garments designed to alter the body's appearance. It welcomes bodies as they are, then offers to improve their lines beneath clothing. This is not hypocrisy but an accurate reflection of contemporary culture, which encourages unconditional self-love while treating the self as an ongoing renovation project.

Kardashian does not attempt to resolve that contradiction. Instead, she has built a business around it, acknowledging insecurity without treating it as a private failure. Shapewear is framed not as a solution to bodily inadequacy but as a tool that enables action despite insecurity. The architecture mirrors that logic, creating environments that feel both aspirational and accessible, monumental and intimate.

At World Archi Design, we have tracked the gradual dissolution of boundaries between residential and commercial interiors, particularly as brands seek authenticity through spatial storytelling. Skims represents an unusually literal version of that strategy, translating domestic interiors into retail environments without significant mediation. The result is a store that feels less like a shop and more like a temporary occupation of someone's home, a spatial experience that reinforces the brand's origin narrative while accommodating the functional demands of global retail.

Looking Forward

The Regent Street store is the fullest physical expression yet of a brand that began in closets and hallways. As Skims expands internationally, the architectural language developed by de Cárdenas will serve as a template, a spatial vocabulary that can be adapted to different markets while maintaining material and chromatic consistency.

The broader question is whether this approach, rooted in residential minimalism and the aesthetics of personal restraint, can sustain a global retail presence. Minimalism has historically been a difficult sell outside affluent markets, where it can read as cold or exclusionary. Skims will need to balance its commitment to material simplicity with the need to create environments that feel welcoming across diverse cultural contexts.

For now, the brand occupies a unique position in the intimate apparel market, selling garments that acknowledge the body's vulnerabilities while framing self-management as a form of agency rather than shame. The architecture supports that proposition, creating spaces that feel contemplative, warm, and deliberately unlike anything that has come before in this category.

Credit: Skims