I visited Skims’ London store. Kim Kardashian convinced me of one thing.

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A few months ago, what looked like a very large marshmallow appeared to be eating a building on the corner of London’s Regent Street. Behind these plush, tactile temporary walls, the first physical store in Europe for Skims, Kim Kardashian’s underwear brand, was taking shape, and drawing a lot of attention in the process. Even before it was ready, the shop seemed hell-bent on grabbing people’s attention. Last week, the store officially opened.

Kim Kardashian has been needling at the edges of even the most celebrity-ignorant person’s attention for almost two decades now. She is probably the most capital-C Celebrity of the 21st century: recognizable, ubiquitous, richer than Croesus, and the instigator of countless megaviral pop-cultural moments over her time in the limelight. Skims, a minimalist range of underwear for a wide range of skin tones and sizes, is her first quote-unquote serious business venture.

I went down to the Skims London store after work on a weekday evening to see what can be learned about Kim K’s status in 2026, now that it has broken through the glass of people’s Instagram feeds and into the physical world over here. Given the global-homogenizing ways of the internet, it’s hard to say with full certainty, but I suspect that the average British person thinks of Kim Kardashian as being a little bit more distant from their daily lives than the average American does. We know about her, sure, and view her ultra-stardom with awe as Americans do, but with even less comprehension of what it might be like to be her. Everything I have personally learned about her has been against my will. And still. Could, I dared to wonder, this American celebrity of near-mythic gaucheness convince me to buy a bralette?

The whole experience of being in the store in these early weeks is, naturally, thanks to how social media hype shepherds people around big cities these days, sort of ridiculous. You’ve been able to buy some Skims products in person in London for a while—there are outlets in Harrods and Selfridges, the latter of which is only a short walk from this new store. But its own dedicated, purpose-designed store is a new prospect, and people seem hungry for it. There is a roped-off queue outside, and a queue inside for the fitting rooms that I was blithely told, when I waltzed over with my single prospective bra, was half an hour long. The interior is smooth and beige, air conditioned to all hell, well lit and tastefully pumped with perfume and soft lounge jazz, and the experience of sitting (on a window ledge, in my case, as all the beige puff seats were taken) for that half an hour before a fitting room becomes free is like being in some kind of insanely plush private hospital. The pajamas, I feel duty-bound to say, are diabolically ugly, in butterfly prints and another with cartoon bunnies and a set of car keys (?!) on them, but the majority of the stock is simple, skin tone, and stylish in a way that contributes to the overall vibe of clean luxury, for not-cheap but not-laughable prices.

Kardashian herself is, at least explicitly, absent from the store. Neither her name nor her likeness appears anywhere, a marked contrast to, for instance, the giant balloon statue of her that appeared in Times Square last year to advertise the new Skims swim line. And this makes sense, because in order to be considered a truly successful company, rather than one vanity arm of a celebrity’s income portfolio, Skims needed to eventually stand on its own feet.

Speaking to people in the London store, most of whom were in their 20s, it seems that Skims has now done that. Nobody I spoke to was there because of Kardashian, or not directly. They were there for the perceived high caliber of the products. “I don’t really care that it’s her brand,” a PR professional called Lauren I met in the queue told me; “to be honest, I don’t think that highly of her as a person. But the clothes look like really good quality.” Ewan and Kelce, fashion students at Central Saint Martins college, also said that they would be here regardless of whose brand it was, but that the brand has made them impressed with Kardashian as a person. “I don’t think that she’s done it to make money,” Ewan said. “I actually think she’s done it to put the quality into women’s wear and shapewear. She’s a genius.” It’s impressive—Kardashian has convinced at least some of her customers that she’s done them a service with Skims.

Of course, Kardashian is there. She’s in the DNA of the space and its products. She is like the ghost at the feast. The store looks like her spartan houses as seen on Instagram, a 23-year-old woman named Noelle pointed out. “I assume this is what her home smells like,” agreed her friend Priscilla. But the core of the store, its very foundation, is Kardashian’s body. “It’s very custom to her. Even the mannequins are shaped like her,” Priscilla said. Which, oddly, feels true, even though the mannequins dressed in bodysuits and shapewear are all of different sizes and skin tones. They are all full-figured, smooth, sculpted, Kim Kardashian–shaped.

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Kardashian has been selling her body for many years in one way or another: the (alleged) BBL, the all-but-nude Instagram photos, the reality TV show, the sex tape. Her body is here on Regent Street but in disguise as our bodies. There is what appears to be a full-time staff of people in the shop tasked with polishing the many mirrored surfaces. Your perfectly unsmeared reflection is unavoidable in the store, which is styled with the smooth, rounded beige furniture that we know from seeing Kardashian’s home on so many platforms across so many years. Look, she’s saying, here you are, right alongside me.

And listen: I bought the bra. The dressing room lighting was flattering; the bra fit well and seemed well made. What is it that made me buy the $48 bra, having not intended to buy one when I entered the store? She creates in me, in us, a strange junction of the feelings both that she is utterly unlike us—almost alien in her physicality and having reached escape velocity from all the financial pressures that life exerts on almost everybody else on earth—and that she is kind of like us. Skims is the perfect product for such a person to offer the masses: a brand that makes unflashy, functional clothing suitable for everyday wear that nonetheless is sold on the understanding that what you want is for your every day to be like hers. With Skims, Kardashian is saying: Here, for slightly more money than you might wish to spend, but not loads more, you can still keep up with me.

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