News Update: As the first standalone Skims store opens in the UK, Osman Ahmed talks to Kim Kardashian and her longtime collaborator Rafael de Cárdenas about creating ‘comfortable, safe and sexy’ spaces for the apparel brand that began in her closet……see more

The world is so chaotic,’ says Kim Kardashian over the phone from LA, ‘so I always wanted my home to feel really simple and warm’.

In the world according to Kardashian, chaos is evidently a condition best answered with beige. The colour has become as central to her iconography as her hourglass silhouette, appearing in oatmeal, mushroom, taupe, sand and innumerable other shades that exist somewhere between skin and stone. The store is grand, but in the service of distinctly intimate items: underwear, T-shirts, socks and the concealed scaffolding worn beneath a dress.

There is an amusing disproportion between the monumentality of the space and the private, sometimes ungainly act at the centre of it. Pulling on shapewear is rarely an elegant procedure. It involves tugging, contortion and the fear that one may never fully emerge from it, at least metaphorically speaking.

Skims has housed this negotiation between flesh and elastic within something akin to a temple. That scale is not accidental.