When is a bra not (just) a bra?
Content warning: Nipples
I don’t go out of my way to keep up with the Kardashians, but when a Kardashian thrusts herself, prow first, into my social-media feed, I can’t help sitting up and taking notice.
Last weekend on Instagram, Kim Kardashian, co-founder and CEO of Skims, an underwear company, announced an addition to the company’s product line. In the video Kardashian wears spectacles and a form-fitting taupe turtleneck. She peers into a circa-1990 beige PC monitor and recites … wait, what?
“The earth’s temperature is getting hotter and hotter,” Kardashian says. “The sea levels are rising. The ice sheets are shrinking. And I’m not a scientist, but I do believe everyone can use their skill set to do their part. That’s why”—now wearing a skin-tight, short-sleeved crewneck top, she pivots to a science-y-looking diagram on the wall—”I’m introducing a brand-new bra with a built-in nipple.”
Why (Why? Why?), you are asking. The answer:
“So no matter how hot it is, you’ll always look cold.”
Cold? Not “aroused”? Or, as Zoe Williams put it in The Guardian, looking “more naked than you would naked”?
Let’s press Resume on that video. “Some days are hard,” Kardashian philosophizes. “But these nipples are harder.” She flips her hair and arches her back. “And unlike the icebergs”—the camera zooms in on her twin peaks—”these aren’t going anywhere.”
It’s called the Ultimate Nipple Bra, and we’re meant to believe that it’s a bra with a real social conscience as well as fake nipples. Here’s how Vogue put it:
Kardashian does actually have a philanthropic aim with her provocative bra. She announced that 10 percent of proceeds from sales will go to One Percent for the Planet, an international environmental organization that encourages businesses to donate, as the name suggests, one percent of annual revenue to globally-conscious causes. (The Skims proceeds are a one-time donation.)
That’s … nice, I guess. But what about that branding language? It’s tough to come up with something more excruciating than “These nipples are harder,” but New York magazine gave it a go. In a tweet about the product launch., the magazine opined: “Kim Kardashian has been quite innovative with Skims, but this nipple bra in honor of climate change might be the most interesting launch from the brand yet.”
Yes, “in honor of climate change.” As one commenter put it on Bluesky, “Climate change must feel so honored.”
Maybe it was because I had just read, with a deepening sense of hopelessness, the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s special climate issue—sample headline: “Beyond Catastrophe”—but I was in no mood for this sort of greenwashing. (Titwashing? Nipplewashing? Bra-vado?) A $62 bra made almost exclusively of petroleum-based products, benippled or not, is the opposite of a cure for what ails our stressed-out planet, and to claim otherwise seems the epitome of cynical opportunism.1
Nor is this product, as New York would have it, “innovative.” It’s true that for the last decade or more the fashion in brassieres has been smoothly contoured foam cups that yield a perfectly round, nipple-obscuring appearance. (I once worked on a naming project for one such bra. The client rejected all my names in favor of their own: “Modern Sculpture.” It was a terrible name—so hard, so cold—and the product flopped, even if the breasts within did not.)
But nipple denial hasn’t always been à la mode. Most famously, in 1964—the onset of an era that celebrated “natural” looks for women—the designer Rudi Gernreich introduced the “No-Bra Bra,” two triangles of sheer nylon that let the girls be upstanding in all weather and emotions.
About 15 years ago —I haven’t been able to pin down the exact date—Victoria’s Secret introduced its Natural Bombshell Bra, which looked a lot like the Skims Ultimate Nipple Bra but coyly avoided the word nipple.
So there I was, feeling grumpy and snarky about the Ultimate Nipple Bra. Then I went back to Instagram and started reading comments on the Skims posts. They were, to my surprise, mostly positive, and some of them introduced an angle I hadn’t considered. “As a breast cancer survivor, with a double mastectomy and no nips left, I really really appreciate this!” was a comment that typified the sentiment. Other commenters noted that the bra could be “gender affirming” for trans women.
I am neither a breast cancer survivor nor a trans woman, so my opinion here counts for little, but if fake nipples can make some people (and not just leering 13-year-old boys) feel better about themselves, hurrah. However, I am a person with experience in branding and marketing, and so I’ll just note that there are no trans women or women with mastectomies in the Ultimate Nipple Bra promotions I’ve seen, nor is any portion of the profits earmarked (breastmarked?) for those causes. Nope, it’s all “Pretend to fight climate change by looking like you’re freezing,” not to mention “Get the lift of a boob job plus the perky look of going braless.”
This is not the first time in Skims’ short history that Kardashian has invited controversy. When the brand launched, in June 2019, it was called Kimono, and the backlash was swift and harsh. “My culture is not your brand name generator,” read one tweet. Another: “Wow, @KimKardashian Thanks for BUTCHERING Japanese culture!!! My culture is not your plaything. You don't have any respect for people who are not your family, do you? In the 15 yrs developing this project, couldn't you find a cultural advisor?” The hashtag #KimOhNo briefly trended.2
“You would think we would have obviously thought it through a little bit deeper,” Kardashian admitted in a interview with WSJ Magazine. “‘I’m the first person to say, ‘Okay, of course, I can’t believe we didn’t think of this.’ I obviously had really innocent intentions.” Those intentions, it appears, centered on embedding her own first name into the brand. By August, Cosmopolitan reported that “Skims” would replace “Kimono.” The new name still incorporated “Kim,” but it didn’t offend anyone and it’s appropriately suggestive of “closely fitting but not constricting.”
As for the “Ultimate Nipple Bra” name—well, “ultimate” means “last,” so maybe the climate connection is apt after all. With climate-related emergencies increasing in scope and severity each year, this could be the last bra you’ll have a chance to buy. But hey—at least you’ll look perky when the world ends.
Update: Read this post on ’s HEATED Substack for a thorough discussion of the greenwashing tactics in the Ultimate Nipple Bra launch video.
It’s even more cynical when you consider that in 2016, when Kardashian told a conference of women bloggers that she wasn’t a feminist, she added: “I’m not the free-the-nipple type of girl,” she said. In her defense (must I?), you could say that the Ultimate Nipple Bra doesn’t free nipples as much as reconstruct them.
OMG. Such a brilliant takedown on so many levels! So fun to read.
Here’s a cheaper, truly climate-friendly alternative to Kim’s petroleum product: slice off the end of a lemon. Squeeze the juice into your favorite cocktail or onto your avocado toast. Hollow out the flesh and compost it (that’s the climate-friendly part). Then slip the lemon nip into your favorite bra and voila! Citrus-y erect.
(Disclaimer: Never tried this myself but let’s just say I’ve seen it done.) 😜
I recently purchased a shirt online that turned out to be tighter across the bust than I had anticipated. As a result, my nipples, such as they are, are fairly prominently displayed--too prominently displayed, I had thought, for any professional setting, but now I see that I will be proudly fighting climate change by wearing it. That, at least, is what I plan to tell HR when the time comes.