admin When Kim Kardashian debuted her wildly popular intimates brand, Skims, in 2019, she was the primary inspiration behind its first collection: a line of “solution-oriented” sculpting shapewear modeled after the many self-customized (and oftentimes MacGyvered) undergarments she’d worn over the years. Since then, Skims has expanded into the loungewear multiverse, churning out bras and underwear, swimwear, and sleep sets in an endless array of technical fabrics and on-trend colors. They dabbled in unisex starting with a “Boyfriend Collection” launched in 2020, but according to Kardashian and her co-founder, Jens Grede, they’ve been consistently surprised by how many men—many of whom had been introduced to the brand by women in their lives—were clamoring for some Skims of their own.
Introducing: Skims Men’s, which will drop on this Thursday, October 26 with an inaugural run of underwear, tees, and socks.
“We’ve never had a bigger request than to launch men’s,” Kardashian tells GQ, echoing the idea that the brand already had male customers who “would hear their girlfriends or their wives or loved ones talking about Skims.” Grede—who serves as Skims’s CEO and has also helped shepherd the e-retail offshoot Mr. Porter, the denim company Frame, and Tom Brady’s apparel brand Brady, among other ventures—gets even more technical.
“Twenty percent of our traffic, and 10% of our customers, are already men,” Grede says. “That means we’ve had 50 million men coming to site over the last few months.” Plus, he adds, “for me personally, I wanted more stuff to wear. I was running a bit dry with my one T-shirt.”
These were the types of customers who already owned one-off Skims pieces like tees or pajama pants from the Boyfriend Collection, which “was going to be the start of our men’s (line),” says Kardashian. “My brother (Rob) was trying it all on for me and being my fit model, and (he) thought that the material was a bit too thin and had a lot of notes.” So she and Grede took all those notes back to the drawing board to build out a fully realized menswear line, kicking off a three-year process to finalize these initial offerings, which will come in three fabric-centric collections: Cotton, Stretch, and Sport. (Per Kardashian, a men’s shapewear line—a fan request since the brand debuted in 2019—is forthcoming, “but we’re not launching with that.”)
