Let Them Look: Branding in the Mean Girl Era
There's enough painful things about being a woman.....
Hello new readers! Glad you’re here. I swear I don’t talk Kardashians every week.
What do pierced nipples, $1B empires and women in-fighting have in common? Let’s talk SKIMS.
Last week SKIMS/The Gredes/Kim dropped the invention1 the world didn’t know it wanted.2
The art direction is Maxim or 90s grindhouse.3The reel is SNL faux-mercial. The product: The Ultimate Pierced Nipple Push-Up bra4.
The message: pure 2025.
SKIMS: In on the Joke
The main campaign is pure camp. Forget the unbridled cartoonery of the men, the non-SKIMS women are more interesting and more subtle.
Because whose judgment worries us more?
It’s all brought home with some female commiseration and relief: There’s Enough Painful Things About Being a Woman. Get the ow without the ouch.
While I’d like the word “empowerment” blasted out of marketing jargon into outer space, SKIMS at least has fun with the most available source: hotness.
The hotness that leads to unbothered. And these days, unbothered is the ultimate superpower.
In SKIMS world, the judgment can’t touch you. In fact, it’s a form of applause.
If you aren’t judged, did you even happen?
Made You Look. Let Them Watch.
The Kardashians made bank—$2B of combined net worth for this matriarchal, all-female biz fam5—by cashing all-in on an old trope and persistent reality.
To be female is to have an audience. To be observed. By men, at least for a good 30-40ish years. Increasingly by Big Brother/Big Daddy.6
But perhaps most blisteringly and eternally, by other women.
When we were kids, any schoolyard drama got dismissed with, “They’re just jealous.”
Long before Mel Robbins, the Kardashian family brand lived that Let them7 ethos.
Remember: it all started with a sex tape. No such thing as bad publicity, especially when you’ve got a product drop.
Catfights get Clicks
The press loves a good girl-on-girl takedown. I’m sure SKIMS organic web traffic does, too.
SLAM? Eh, the sentiments seemed fairly balanced. But more importantly, there were a lot of them. The audience does the moderation for the brand as people take sides.
“Is this a joke?” “WANT.”8 Some see hotness. Some see empowerment. Some see justice for women with mastectomies. Some see uptight women who need to move along. And yes, plenty see a $74 bra with fake pierced nipples and ask “WHYYY?????”
All are useful.
The most interesting cadre: Pierced Nip Factions. Many are enraged: They lived it! Had the ouch! Eff the posers! Yet others said, Hey, now I can properly represent in a padded bra. My piercing never healed. Yay Kim.
And wait. What if Team SKIMS are thinking even bigger:
Apparently the Chinese market is heating up to the power of more self-sexualizing. SKIMS is there to serve.
Don’t Tell Me What I Want
When one reddit user said what we don’t want to sexualize ourselves, another replied:
👆
Someday I’ll figure out where I read this: Men’s learned power is open confrontation, women’s is policing each other into conformity.
Can we free ourselves from the female police state? Where every “wrong” word or imperfect expression gets you jumped, often in the name of feminism?
SKIMS, Goop, and other brands people love to love and love to hate model uh-huh.
Because this fear- and shame-based conformity is what has made brands targeting women boring, blah, safe and truly sexist for decades.
Not just because of the men who run them, but because of the women who do, too. (I know, I’ve been in the meetings.)
We’re all a little bit racist and we’re all a little bit misogynist, too. But it’s so much easier to point it out in each other vs. unpacking it ourselves.
Maybe this is why women’s corners of the internet are getting more stifling than shapewear.
Parasocial Witch Hunts. Or when everyone’s a mean girl, is anyone a mean girl?
Since 2020, women online have continued to factionalize and spend more time telling each other how they are WRONG vs you know, maybe trying to actually change things.
Take the Great Substack War of Glennon Doyle (RIP: 2025). Just this month, Glennonites posted screeds against the “Mean Girls” who shouted Doyle off the platform within a week. (And out of an immediate take of maybe $10M, by my count. Very real money.)
These anti-Mean Girl-ers were writing takedowns of Glennon’s critics with lines like “Take this as a right cross punch that draws blood.” What? Who’s the Mean Girl? The intensity of her Parasocial burden makes me worry for Glennon more.
Any critique is now an act of war. It can’t be capitalism or professional competition, just anti-woman because it’s easier and safer to attack other women. We’ve been trained our whole lives for it!
There was another Substacker Witch Burning last week. She dared to examine how she kinda looked like Anne Hathaway and the star’s recent facial refreshes made her feel insecure, examining her own aging and life in a way that was complicated and melancholy. And probably experienced in some way by every human who ever compared themselves to someone else.9
These Instagram spiritual life coach word salads bypass the real pain and do nothing to move things forward. But they get clicks, because tribal attacks feel like power.
SILENCE! You humble bragging, body shaming, traitorous omisogynist fat Karen who isn’t even that hot!!!10
I’ve written about this before BTW and used that quote here:
Even the Famous Can’t All Be Kim & Gwyneth
From Miranda July’s latest newsletter on the shame of being a conflicted woman with un-chic conflicted women problems:
we understood we were somehow less radical than we should be, as feminists, to still be rehashing these same issues (freedom, marriage) or still feeling shame (about aging, fear of aging, menopause, desire)… The feeling is that if you're having this problem in 2025, then the problem must be you.11
It’s easier to go parasocial and attack than own your own power and messiness, and focus on the problem.
I used to really dislike and dismiss Kim and Gwyneth. Until I realized they are unapologetically who they are. Unbothered is the superpower of the 21st century. And the only way for a brand to make it in what, I believe, will soon be largely a post-brand market.
So these days, when I see Kim K’s social team respond only to comments about placing orders.
Or see Gwyneth showing up to court looking like a 1970s superstar - or talk about how Being First is Better Than Being Liked.
Respect.
Bossbitch Branding in a Post-Brand World
Last note on this dumb bra. On their feed, I found this image juxtaposition the most interesting of all of it:
Old paradigm: Madonna/Whore.
Men and MBAs putting us into boxes where we can’t win and we are restricted. We knew better, but we bought into it.
SKIMS paradigm: Yeah? So? And? Women contain multitudes.
Women playing with expectations. Using hotness as a Bossbitch superpower, whether externally or for themselves. Mom influencer-adjacent by day, unbothered bombshell at a seedy bar for kicks.
Old brand thinking would say these two images can’t co-exist in a brand. They are too different. And only the tackiest, nastiest brand on earth would run the first campaign. The other is too basic. Our woman does NOT identify as a mother! Our woman does NOT identify as a baddie. Hot women are dumb. Smart, good women don’t dress in khakis cut into weird booty short/chaps. (But really, who does?)
The modern brand is about a POV that brings something to the customer. That entertains or engage. Not a cut and paste “look.” One that uses debate as fuel and maybe even a KPI.
Soon consumer decision making will be taken over by ChatGPT. Only BIG brand swings will mean anything.
The women are not just one expression, brands can’t be either. (see: Enjoli)
Don’t Hate the Player, Change the Game
"I started to look at our careers like pieces on a chessboard...Every day, I woke up and walked into my office and asked myself, 'What move do you need to make today?' It was very calculated. My business decisions and strategies were very intentional, definite and planned to the nth degree."[51]
from Kris Jenner… And All Things Kardashian
And as bras dropped, the amplification unfolded further:
Kris Jenner debuted some killer plastic surgery. Not coyly. She fully credited her plastic surgeon. And began styling herself like late 80s Michael Jackson12 (I’m not dumb enough to question her, I merely observe to understand.)
Kim wore $6M in jewels to her jewelry theft court appearance. When she wasn’t faux pierced nipping out.
Bossbitches! Get the bag and stay in on the joke.
Stay wild.
The coyotes of San Francisco reminded me of the frictions of being our truest selves in this world. Perhaps their return is a karmic wilding rebalance for Silicon Valley.
IMPORTANT: Call about the Big Beautiful Bill - Too big, Not beautiful
If you’ve been avoiding politics, there’s a bill in the Senate right now, passed already by the house.
Amongst other issues, it will
- block and nullify any regulation or restriction by states on AI for 10 years, so your data is anyone’s for the taking and selling. Amongst a Pandora’s box of other issues, like AI bots urging kids to take their lives.
- gives current administration full immunity from the courts
I don’t care what your politics are, that’s not good.
It takes 3 minutes, for real.
Not their invention, actually. An enterprising makeup artist launched one a few years ago but the search is now so buried I can’t find it.
Many of us don’t.
I’ve written before about how SKIMS—and Rhode— plays with late 20th century advertising and editorial tropes.
Yours for $72
Where is the son, anyway?
Call your senators.
Or Cassie Phillips. Professionals steal! See footnote 1.
Only the beige that was featured on this model sold out, however.
Post removed due to virulent commenters
The post was down, is now back up.
She will be ok because All Fours - out in paperback this summer.
You see it, don’t you?
“If you aren’t judged, did you even happen?”
Hoping for the end of that very real … is it belief? Paradigm?
Great post, Julie!