underwear, skims, style Neymar wearing skims underwear, Image: Courtesy of Skims
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.”)
And speaking of sports, Skims gathered a high-profile starting roster of professional athletes—Oklahoma City Thunder point guard (and GQ’s twice-voted Most Stylish Man) Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, San Francisco 49ers defensive lineman Nick Bosa, and Brazilian soccer legend Neymar—for its menswear inaugural campaign, though those spots were highly coveted.
“I was surprised by how many men, especially athletes, gravitated to the brand,” says Grede. “They would say, ‘If you ever do men’s, we will be in the campaign. If you ever do men’s, you got to think of me first.’”
The athletic angle, says Kardashian, also came from “experiencing sports with my kids, having it be a part of our daily life with my daughter who loves basketball, my son [who] plays American football and soccer. Having someone from each sport, and me traveling the world to go to these soccer games with my son and all of his friends—getting some of their idols in the campaign is like a ‘pinch me’ moment.”
The star-studded launch aside, Kardashian (who herself likes to wear the Skims Men’s boxer briefs to bed) and Grede are most excited to bring some innovation to an underserved market.
Most of the men’s basics out there tend to prioritize quantity—a bunch of pre-rolled socks smushed into a plastic bag, for example—over quality, much less charm.
“It’s hard to go back to a Costco multipack once you try Skims Men’s,” Grede says, “that I can tell you.”
[ Via GQ US]
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