Kim Kardashian has said she created her SKIMS shapewear brand as a solution to get lingerie to match her skin tone.
The Keeping Up With The Kardashians star recalled how she used to dye her old shapewear with “coffee or tea bags” to get the right colour for her skin.
Speaking at the 2023 TIME100 Summit on Tuesday (25 April), Kardashian said: “For me, I was just looking for a solution to the fact that I love to wear shapewear and there wasn’t a colour tone that fit my skin tone, let alone most of my friends.
“There was either a super light nude, which was a more pale colour, and then the colour black. There was really nothing in between.”
She continued: “So I would take coffee and tea bags and I would put them in the sink or the bathtub and put shapewear in here.
“I would cut them all up because you know, the cuts weren’t right, and I found one of my original ones, I always kept them, and it was just so funny to look back and see what I would try to do.”
SKIMS, which offers a range of shapewear in different skin tones, was Kardashian’s opportunity to “fill the gap” in the market, she explained.
“Because it didn’t exist, I wanted to create that and find better materials, better colours, and we launched a pretty wide arrangement of nude tones and we grew from there,” the entrepreneur said.
She launched the brand in 2019. As of 2022, SKIMS was worth $3.2bn.
In 2016, Kardashian posted a video about dyeing part of a couture gown that she wore to the Cannes Film Festival that year with Earl Grey tea bags.
The dress, custom made by Lan Yu Couture, include an intricate beaded gown that was to be worn over a slip dress that was meant to be nude-coloured, but did not match Kardashian’s skin tone.
The reality star explained: “We had to try to darken the nude mesh dress under the silver layer, because it was too light to match my skin tone.
“We had just two hours before we left for Cannes, so we put Earl Grey tea bags in a sink and put the dress in for about 30 minutes to dye it.”
Her team later blow-dried the dress so that she could put it on and wear it on the red carpet.
Last year, Kardashian was honoured at the annual Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Fashion Awards for her shapewear brand.
As she accepted the first-ever Innovation Award, she took the opportunity to call on the industry to “embrace size equality and diversity as a fixture and not just a trend”.
