Kim Kardashian teaches us the new rules of business from an office that looks suspiciously like an aircraft hangar. There is a vending machine in the background, and a coffee table that could have been chiselled by a Neolithic craftsman. We hover around her as she perches on beige armchairs and says things like “You really have to manage your time well.” She poses for beige photoshoots in beige underwear. Sometimes she types on her MacBook while wearing a leather trench coat, like the villain in a film by Roberto Rossellini. “I wouldn’t have learned half of what I learned about business had I not experienced it,” she tells us. “Everything is teaching you something, giving you those tools and skills to be the most professional.”
Kim’s takeaways are called the Ten Kimmandments, and she’s offering them for a fee on the educational subscription service MasterClass. We’re mostly learning from her post-2019 experience as the helmswoman of mid-range beige fashion empire Skims. The brand will sell you a push-up bra for £68, or a thong bodysuit for £74. It’s known for its seamless “shapewear,” which pads and constricts you so you can feel better about yourself. “When I was pregnant, I always wore shapewear,” says Kim. There’s a maternity range, a campus collection for sorority girls, and a range of bras with built-in nipples, which were produced as a publicity stunt but proved an unexpected hit with cancer patients.
It is these “unforgettable moments,” says Kim, “that will dominate the conversation.” Don’t Follow The Feed, goes Kimmandment IV. Be the Feed. We watch as a gigantic inflatable woman lolls across Times Square, wearing a blue Skims bikini. There are a few social media clips of Kardashian with wings and toned-down eyebrows, playing a character called the Fairy Butt Mother. She waves her wand; a panic-stricken model gets “a butt, boobs, and amazing curves immediately.”
“I’ve always been in on the joke,” she says, not looking entirely convinced. “Just showing we’re in on it too, like butt pad shapewear? Yeah. Funny, amazing.” Skims sell a merkin thong, too, for £34. A pause for her glam team. Someone enters stage right and flips her hair over her shoulder. Kim explains, with some trepidation, what a merkin is.
“I thought it was some kind of Birkin for men,” says a Masterclass producer, offscreen.
Skims was once called Kimono. Kim’s team printed the name on the inside of their stock, shot a campaign, and launched the brand on social media. Then crisis hit. Online onlookers accused her of cultural appropriation. The mayor of Kyoto told her to stop. From here we derive Kimmandment V – Turn Failure into Strategy. Her Instagram apology flashes up. Animated words pop out at us: “I am always listening, learning and growing.” In the accompanying photo she’s half-naked and perched on a wheeled stool. Heads of huge fashion companies approached her conspiratorially to ask whether Kimono was a publicity stunt. It wasn’t. “Negativity rarely translates into lost sales,” she tells us, “unless it impacts core trust.”
Her fans helped her focus-group a new name. Your Customer, she tells us, Is Your Cofounder. She listened to fans who asked for a hole to help them wee out of their shapewear, and later obliged another fan who asked that the hole be widened. A lot of Kim’s business advice is about putting feelers out into the wider culture, which mostly means being on your phone. “Culture,” she tells us with Frankfurt School flair, “is a goldmine of information.” TikTok helps her keep up with it in real time. Group chats are “mini focus groups that spark ideas.” She scrolls Instagram “like a magazine.” She’s always taking screenshots. There are behind-the-scenes videos in which she hoists her phone into the air and says things like “I have to tell you about the craziest bra.”
“You don’t have time for social media?” For the very first time her face turns sour. “Don’t start a brand then.”
It’s hard to understand how Kim has time. While a business partner takes care of “back-of-house,” she claims to perform a dizzying array of tasks that would ordinarily require a formal education in womenswear. “I do all of the creative,” says Kim. “I come up with all the marketing, I do all of the photoshoots and fabrics and the fits.” She’s sick of being “underestimated.” “Everyone thought they had me figured out…” she tells us at the start of the course, “… they had no idea I was building…” To make her case, we get a montage of clips evidencing an early interest in the fashion business, saying things like: “I love fashion!” “I sold anything and everything,” she tells us. “You brought me a weight loss pill and a cupcake deal… every deal taught me something. And I learnt the visibility of the product was so important to selling the product…”
Part of the story is missing here. While Kris Jenner’s name only comes up three minutes before the end of the course, her role in her daughter’s career was so intensive it necessitated the coining of a special portmanteau. Keeping Up With the Kardashians generally made a bigger deal of Kris’s “momaging” than Kim’s business savvy. The Kardashian matriarch appeared on camera presiding over photoshoots, booking appearances and making endorsement deals; early in the show she felt underappreciated and redirected an influx of calls to Kim, who panicked straight away. The guerilla-marketing, controversy-farming instinct is Jenner’s, too: in one episode she stumbled across proofs of a private nude calendar intended for Kim’s boyfriend and immediately hawked them to local shops.
In casting off her mother, Kim is trying to conform to a newer model of female celebrity. Feminism made the mid-2000s obsolete. Glamour models and celebrity sex tapes no longer figure much in mainstream culture; the Kardashians rose to fame in a world with different values and a different Hollywood ecosystem. Skims is a ticket into a suited, booted axis of influencer-CEOs, who mostly sell oversized beige outerwear to upwardly mobile working-class fans. Kim’s British counterpart is the influencer Molly-Mae Hague, who appeared in an early series of Love Island, spent a couple of years wandering around Manchester in oversized beige outerwear and pivoted, at 22, to a creative director role at fast-fashion website PrettyLittleThing.
The brand showcased Hague on YouTube frolicking on a warehouse floor, gesticulating at racks of clothes, and looking over shoulders at product images. “I love to sort of oversee a little bit of everything that’s going on in the office,” she said. She caused a commotion after appearing on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast and repeating a class-blind truism about how we all have the same 24 hours in a day as Beyoncé. Now she’s moved on: her brand Maebe sells mid-range oversized beige outerwear.
The promises here are recursive. These influencers have achieved business success because of their lifestyles, which you can replicate by buying into their brands. This is what Kim’s Masterclass is a masterclass in. The Kimmandments are the sort of thing you’d encounter in any book or listicle about online entrepreneurship; the real point is that you’re watching a 78-minute-long advertisement for the Skims brand, and the Skims aesthetic and Skims ethos. What sticks are the personal anecdotes, the staged typing, the footage of launch parties and collaborations with North Face and Nike, the endless shots of women of all shapes and sizes wearing bodysuits in different shades of nude. The canniest marketing minds will work it all out long before we get to Kimmandment X, which is a cop-out: Because I said so.
[Further reading: AI teddy bears should not give bondage advice]
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