Cinched, Toned, Depressed: A Trip to Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS Store in Austin

photo by Kimberley Jones / illustration: PhotoMania

I gave birth in September and my sanity held together until January.

It was January – the month of New Year’s resolutions, gym memberships, and self-improvement, the month my baby slept just enough for me to understand You have no excuse now, the month when the ocean of stretch marks, discolorations, and cellulite emanating from my navel failed to just wash away – that I began to crack.

It was January that brought me to stand among the racks at SKIMS in the Domain Northside. SKIMS, Kim Kardashian’s e-commerce brand of shapewear, underwear, and pajamas, opened its first retail location in Austin in November of last year, with clothing that promised to “cinch, tone, and smooth.” If I couldn’t reform my body, and I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore, perhaps I could disguise it instead.

It was cold on the morning I left the baby and drove down Loop 1. The silence in the car was eerie. I’d rarely been alone since her birth. When your days are consumed with giving, you soon become desperately interested in something else: taking. In Austin, Texas, the Domain is the place for taking. Here, with a high enough credit limit, you can take anything you like: Louis Vuitton purses, Gucci belts, Versace sunglasses. You can take expensive food from posh restaurants. You can take a new romantic interest at the counter of a popular bar. You can take pictures, so many pictures – of yourself, your food, your romantic interest. You can smell it, the desire to take, as soon as your car pulls onto the Domain’s labyrinthian grounds. Here, enough is never enough.

Since its opening in 2007, the Domain environs have grown from just another outdoor mall to 300-acre center of commerce, complete with 3.4 million square feet of office space leased by employers like Amazon, Meta, and Vrbo. IBM, with the addition of two 14-story office towers, is joining soon. What Austinites colloquially refer to as “the Domain” is actually two separate properties, the original development operated by Simon Property Group, and the later addition, Domain Northside, which includes Nordstrom, Apple, and SKIMS, is owned and operated by Northwood Retail. The great innovation of Austin’s “second Downtown” is the motto “live, work, play,” which means it is no longer necessary to leave the place where you make money in order to spend it. This design has propelled both developments to new heights: Simon Property Group is undertaking multi-million dollar renovations in 2024 and 2025 to continue meeting demand, and local Austin businesses like the Steeping Room have left while across the street, billionaires like Kardashian have arrived. The fact that Kardashian, a woman with access to every retail center in the world, chose to open her first SKIMS store in Austin, specifically at the Domain Northside, tells us something about our city’s appetite for taking. It must be insatiable.

After several loops through the parking garage, I find a spot, zip up my parka, and shuffle inside the store. It is packed. If SKIMS has 5.6 million followers on Instagram, it seems at least a million live in Austin. The line for fitting rooms snakes from the back of the store to the front, running between half-naked mannequins and display racks of spandex bodysuits. The walls are draped in silk satin sheets. Music pulses all around. How foreign it is, I think, looking at the decor, the products, the young women who have come here to shop, their eyes bright and skin clean. How foreign it is to be in a place dedicated to the work of appearance when for so many months my appearance has been an afterthought. I listen to young women’s conversations about sizes and colorways; they are fluent in the specifics of every line Kardashian has ever created. It’s true, the garments are soft to the touch and the shapes are appealing – they are the clothes I would want to wear if all of my clothes weren’t eventually covered in spit up. But in their midst I suddenly feel very tired, very old, and very uninterested in peeling off my warm jacket to try on a pair of sculpting high-waisted briefs. I walk back to my car empty-handed.

I drive out through the Domain’s main street, Century Oaks Terrace, and see signage up at the new Versace store. I feel a sort of depression. Crowds hustle between the shops, bags cover their arms. Cars inch along in bumper-to-bumper traffic. A Lamborghini idles on this street, revving its engine. I wonder, what are all these people doing here, and what am I doing with them? Maybe the woman in front of me is worried about a friendship, maybe that man in the Lamborghini is worried about his career. Maybe they both just needed to get out of the house for a little while, too. But really, I can’t imagine how buying anything at Versace will help.

If it’s human nature to try to solve our problems by spending money, it’s our higher nature that asks us please not to. Something in the human spirit rebels against stuffing emotional voids full of material goods. Something in the human spirit rebels against places like this, places that provoke us to feel inadequate rather than remind us we’re absolutely adequate enough. I think of a C.S. Lewis quote as I speed out of the Domain, quietly promising not to return anytime soon: “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.” All you have to do is walk out.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Endeavor operated Domain Northside; it is owned and operated by Northwood Retail. The Chronicle regrets the error.