Reality star and business mogul Kim Kardashian has spent much of her career being told that her body was the product. With Skims, she figured out how to make the product the business.

Founded with Jens Grede in 2019, Skims began with shapewear and underwear and has since expanded into loungewear, menswear, swim and activewear. In November 2025, the company raised $225 million at a $5 billion valuation (roughly ₹41,500 crore), with projected 2025 net sales of more than $1 billion (roughly ₹8,300 crore). For a six-year-old apparel company, it is an extraordinary trajectory: Kim and Jens have taken something once largely hidden under clothes and turned it into a global lifestyle business.

Now, that proposition is coming to India.

On August 5, Reliance Brands announced an exclusive partnership with Skims. The first stores will open in Mumbai and Delhi, followed by a phased expansion across other cities and digital channels. The move comes as Skims expands internationally, following recent openings in London and Dubai, with Hong Kong and Seoul also on the roadmap.

“The excitement we’ve seen from our community in India has been truly incredible,” Kim said in the announcement. Isha Ambani, director, Reliance Retail Ventures, said Skims had “changed how the world thinks about shape, comfort and inclusivity”, adding that the brand speaks to a generation of Indian consumers who want fashion that is “aspirational and made for them.”

That last bit — made for them — is where the India story gets interesting. Because Skims is entering a market where Indian brands have spent years trying to answer a specific question: what does shapewear look like when the body underneath it isn’t a Western sample size?

Skims may have the Kardashian effect, but Indian shapewear isn’t exactly waiting for a teacher. “You cannot school the teacher; she is the teacher!” says Pankhuri Harikrishnan, founder and director of Delhi-based communication and brand experience agency Fetch Consulting, of Kim’s ability to turn product marketing into cultural conversation. But Pankhuri also pushes back on the idea that Indian shapewear is still primarily a wedding purchase. “I do not think weddings largely drive the market.” The bigger shift, she says, is towards launches, events and everyday occasions when consumers want to look and feel their best.

For Anjali Gaekwar, Mumbai-based luxury brand advisor and co-founder of Lighthouse, a boutique retail and lifestyle advisory firm, that evolution is part of a broader premiumisation of the category. “The premium consumer isn’t buying a foundational garment anymore; she’s buying an invisible layer of craftsmanship.” The opportunity, she believes, is increasingly in everyday shapewear that can disappear beneath tailoring, knitwear, saris and kurtas.

There is money behind that shift. US-based market research and consulting company Grand View Research projects India’s shapewear market to reach $202.6 million (roughly ₹1,680 crore) by 2033.

The India opportunity

The opportunity, then, is not simply to sell more shapewear. It is to convince Indian consumers that shapewear belongs in the wardrobe in the first place, and that it can be worth paying more for.

Indian brands have already been doing that work. Kamakshi Agarwala, founder and CEO of Butt-Chique, started the company in 2020, after struggling to find shapewear that worked for her own plus-size body. She says international sizing did not adequately account for the proportions she encountered among Indian women, particularly fuller lower bodies. Butt-Chique developed its own size chart through repeated fittings and testing. “Even the lightest shade is not your Indian lightest shade,” Kamakshi says.

And Indian shapewear is no longer a tiny side category.

Underneat, the shapewear and intimates brand founded by content creator Kusha Kapila and Vimarsh Razdan in 2025, is a useful example of how quickly the market is developing. The brand was built around products for Indian body types and local dressing habits, including a saree-specific shaper, while positioning itself at the mass-premium end of the market. It raised $6 million, or about ₹54.5 crore, from Fireside Ventures in December 2025, only months after launching.

The price difference with Skims is significant. UnderNeat’s current shapewear runs from around ₹899 for a high-waist brief to ₹2,299 for a brief bodysuit, with its saree shapewear at ₹1,199 and most bodysuits and shaping shorts between roughly ₹1,799 and ₹2,299. Its size range, like Butt-Chique, extends to 5XL.

Skims, by comparison, sits considerably higher internationally. Its Cool Shapewear High-Waisted Short is currently $78, or roughly ₹6,500, in the US. The difference is not merely a question of currency: it places a homegrown brand such as UnderNeat at a very different point in the Indian market, particularly for consumers who want to wear shapewear regularly rather than reserve it for expensive occasions.

Preeta Sukhtankar, founder, The Label Life, the Mumbai-based online lifestyle brand, has been wearing shapewear for around two decades. Her verdict is telling: she owns Skims, but prefers the Underneat shapewear she bought herself. “The material is sort of thicker and it has a band with the elastic, which doesn’t allow you to roll it off,” she says. With Skims, she has found the opposite. “It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t shape.” For someone with 20 years of shapewear experience, that is a useful reminder that celebrity and design can only take a foundation garment so far. Eventually, it has to stay up.

Reliance, meanwhile, is hardly a newcomer to intimatewear. The group has been steadily building its position in the category: Reliance Retail acquired Zivame in 2020, took over the Amante business in 2021, and in March 2022 acquired an 89% stake in Clovia for ₹950 crore.

That makes the Skims deal strategically neat. Skims brings cultural cachet and global brand equity; Reliance brings distribution, physical retail, digital reach and years of experience selling intimate apparel in India. It also means Reliance can place Skims inside an ecosystem where it already understands the Indian lingerie customer, from mass and mass-premium offerings to more aspirational international brands.

The result could be less a battle for the existing shapewear customer than a fight to create millions more of them.

Skims has also made inclusivity one of the foundations of its global identity. Its products span a broad size range, while its underwear and shapewear have been offered in a range of skin tones that challenged the historically narrow definition of “nude” in lingerie. Its campaigns have deliberately featured women of different races, ages and body types.

But there is an inherent tension in the proposition. Can a brand challenge narrow beauty standards while selling garments designed to smooth, sculpt and reshape the body?

Hitanshi Kamdar, a London-based e-commerce editor who grew up in Mumbai, has lived through that contradiction herself. She first tried shapewear about four years ago, after initially resisting it as a Gen Z consumer raised amid the body-positivity movement and the backlash against the ultra-thin beauty ideal of the 2000s. Today, she uses it differently. “I like the idea of being able to fit into shapes and silhouettes the way they were designed to be worn,” she says.

That distinction — between concealment and styling — is important. Hitanshi owns two Skims pieces, including a light-compression bodysuit and a Seamless Sculpt brief, and says they “really cinch in” her waist, smoothing lines under fitted clothes. But she also finds the compression demanding. Getting into it, she says, is “a little bit of a workout”. She still prefers M&S for lighter, everyday compression. Skims, in her wardrobe, is the more powerful sculptor; M&S is the workhorse.

And the body conversation is changing again. The body-positivity era has not exactly disappeared, but the return of ultra-thin aesthetics across social media has complicated it. Shapewear now sits somewhere between acceptance and optimisation: I like my body, but I would like this dress to look like that.

The green question

The environmental cost is harder to smooth over.

Most shapewear relies on synthetic fibres and elastane to achieve stretch, compression and recovery. Blended textiles can be difficult to recycle, particularly when different fibres cannot easily be separated.

Aishwarya Lahariya, a textile scientist, climate-impact entrepreneur and co-founder and designer of Jiwya, an artisanal, 100% plant-based luxury slow-fashion and lifestyle brand, argues that the problem is structural rather than specific to Skims. “The polluting impact of synthetic fibres, dyes and finishes is not talked enough even today,” she says.

India already has a significant textile-waste problem. The Ministry of Textiles estimates that the country generates 70.73 lakh tonnes of textile waste annually. The challenge is not that nothing is being recycled; India has an established recycling sector. It is that collection, sorting and recycling remain uneven, particularly for complex blended textiles.

Aishwarya’s question is more uncomfortable. “Why do women need to be in a certain shape always?” she asks. For her, the environmental and body-image conversations are connected: an industry becoming increasingly sophisticated at engineering the silhouette also needs to ask what happens to the material, and the cultural expectations, left behind.

That puts Reliance in an unusually powerful position. It isn’t entering Indian intimatewear from scratch. It has already built a portfolio. Skims therefore arrives with something most international brands don’t have: a local operator that already knows how Indian consumers shop for intimatewear.

Skims will almost certainly remain premium. But its arrival could make shapewear more visible, more aspirational and less embarrassing to buy. It could also force Indian brands to compete harder on fit, fabrication, sizing, colour, packaging and storytelling. Skims is also entering a market that already has shapewear at almost every rung of the price ladder. Established innerwear brands such as Jockey sell women’s seamless shapewear for around ₹999–₹1,199.

Pankhuri thinks there is room for everyone. “This is an industry that is here to stay,” she says, pointing to the potential for local brands to move beyond metros and into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

Anjali is less interested in who wins than in what consumers start demanding. “Indian players understand local body proportions, climate, clothing habits — saris, kurtas — and price sensitivity in a way outsiders can’t easily replicate.”

That may ultimately be the test for Skims. Can a brand that has spent six years convincing the world that everybody deserves shapewear convince Indian consumers that it understands their bodies?

Published - August 19, 2026 12:20 pm IST