Climate change is real, and it’s getting worse. The ocean is warming, the ice sheets are shrinking, the sea level is rising, the glaciers are melting. I wore shorts in February! But don’t pull out your ultimate survival kits just yet. Lucky for the human race, Kim Kardashian might just have the solution to save us all: the SKIMS Ultimate Bra Nipple Push-Up Bra.
A recent addition to her $4 billion shapewear and undergarment brand, the Nipple Push-Up Bra is a padded bra with “a built-in raised nipple detail for a perky, braless look that makes a bold statement,” according to the SKIMS website. The garment, priced at $62, comes in six colors, eight band sizes, and seven cup sizes, all of which are currently sold out. Our savior announced the news through an Instagram reel that, had it not been an advertisement for SKIMS, could have been the trailer for a Keeping Up With the Kardashians spinoff called Kim Goes to Work. Donning a skin-tight beige bodysuit and rimless glasses, Kardashian sits behind a retro computer in a monochromatic office as she explains to her hundreds of millions of followers how her new Nipple Push-Up Bra can save them from imminent climate-change-induced peril, because 10 percent of its profits will go to an environmental nonprofit. “Some days are hard, but these nipples are harder,” Kim lectures, pointing to a “scientific illustration” on a beige chalkboard. “And unlike the icebergs, they aren’t going anywhere.” Now, no matter how hot it is, we can always look cold. Thanks, Kim!
While Kim may have pioneered the climate-change-reversing-faux-nipple push-up bra—though a 1970s advertisement suggests even that may be false—she is hardly the first savvy businesswoman to market the hell out of a bra. The story of iconic bras and bra advertisements begins long before Kim, long before global warming was even a part of the national conversation. Perhaps, then, in order to understand the Nipple Bra, we must look backward, point our nips to the past, and ask ourselves: what exactly is it we are selling when we sell bras?
The everyday bra came into existence at the start of the 20th century. Departing from the restrictiveness of the hard-wired corset upon which breasts depended theretofore, the earliest bras were sold as instruments of comfort rather than style. With level padding rather than separated cups, early bras—called brassieres—flattened, rather than lifted, boobs, promoting a “monobosom” look. They were more functional than stylish. As the 20th century progressed, styles of bras and breasts began to ebb and flow alongside larger fashion changes. In the flapper craze of the 20s, a lanky, boyish look was popular. Brassieres, as such, were tight-fitting and ribbed, designed to flatten breasts.
Certainly, then, the bra was making waves by the mid-20th century. But in order to achieve longevity, it needed support. It needed marketing, an angle, a creative vision. All of that came to fruition in the mind of Ida Rosenthal, who founded Maidenform, one of the country’s first bra companies. Two decades after incorporating Maidenform, hoping to boost sales after the war, Rosenthal dreamt up one of the most iconic and longest-running print ad campaigns of all time. From 1949 to 1969, the more than 100 advertisements in Maidenform’s “Dream” campaign revolutionized how and to whom bras were marketed. The ads feature photographs of real women doing—or, rather, dreaming they can do—real things, topless but for their Maidenform bras. The Dreamers fantasize about going to work, swaying juries, traveling to Paris, winning elections, leading protests—all in their Maidenform bras!
Before the Dream campaign, brassiere advertisements scarcely depicted real women at all. Early bra ads featured somewhat-realistic drawings of fictional women. Rather than at work, or in Paris, or on the town, these woman-sketches posed from the home, enacting domestic scenes like caring for children, cooking, or cleaning. Moreover, these pre-Dreamer bra ads appeared only in women’s publications and, as such, reached an almost entirely female audience. But the Dreamers were real, live women, photographed wearing real Maidenform bras, doing real things—not just stereotypically feminine things. These images of half-naked women outside of the domestic sphere were broadcast across most mainstream publications, in spaces as hyper-public as billboards.
The ads were doubtless a commercial success: in the campaign’s 20-year lifespan, Maidenform’s sales nearly quadrupled, increasing from 14 million in 1949 to 43 million by 1963. But Maidenform’s Dreamers sold more than just bras. They sold a bra that could make you dream. They sold a new vision for femininity, a new definition of what it meant to dress and work and be as an American woman. They sold a fantasy.
Much like a conspiracy theory, a fantasy is only plausible when it contains an element of truth. The “I Dreamed” campaign arose in the 1940s postwar period, at a time when women were entering the workforce at higher rates than they ever had before. By 1949, a new generation of women spent much of their time outside of the home, working in offices and factories on tasks that exceeded domestic duties. For the first time in history, women and their fashions were perceived outside of the home, on a day-to-day basis. Rosenthal capitalized on this shift in circumstance. A working woman needs to be supported, the Dream campaign proclaims—she needs a bra. But Maidenform also sold the inverse. A woman in a bra can aspire to do the things Maidenform’s Dreamers do; a woman in a bra can and should fantasize about independence and professionalism. Though its models are scantily clad, the advertisements exude empowerment more than sex. The sexiness of the Dreamers is the least interesting, least provocative thing about them.
The same can’t be said for Kim. Sure, KKW is also selling a fantasy, with her rimless glasses and antique computer and fake/real nipples that can reverse climate change if you just buy them. But her fantasy is markedly different than Maidenform’s. In the era of the Dreamers, the idea of a working woman was new and invigorating. Now it’s overdone. Women consistently graduate college at higher rates than men. Nearly half of U.S. workers are women. Women are doctors, lawyers, CEOs, and, in pretty much every first world country but America, presidents. In 2024, the working woman isn’t a fantasy at all. It’s a reality.
Perhaps the path towards the modern working woman begins in 2020, with the Covid pandemic and the rise of a work-from-home ethos. With workers confined to their bedrooms and Zoom screens, we saw the rise of waist-up dressing. When they returned to in-person, their Gen-Z counterparts joining them for the first time, business casual became more casual. Fewer workers than ever before are getting dressed up for work. Before Covid, the workplace was somewhere we got ready for and mingled in, comfort only an afterthought. Now, it’s somewhere we go—less frequently than ever before—simply to do our jobs and go home.
Or perhaps the path towards the 2024 working woman begins even earlier in 2016, when pioneering journalists and courageous silence breakers popularized the #MeToo movement to crusade against sexual harassment in the workplace. For decades, workplace sex was something forced upon women, something in which they had no say. #MeToo sought to remedy that problem not by empowering women to have the office sex they want to have, but rather by making offices as sexless as possible.
No matter where we begin our story, we end up in the same place: a culture devoid of sex. Young people are having less sex now than at any other time in the recent past. As women, we’re putting less energy than ever before into making ourselves appear “sexy.” Workplace sex scandals went from the subject of hushed gossip to downright reprehensible career-enders. The working woman of 2024 is a sexless figure, but Kim, in her Instagram reel promoting the Nipple Bra, is oozing with sex. It’s emanating from her many curves, tightly hugged by her SKIMS bodysuit, and glaring at us from each of her protruding fake nipples. Kim turns the modern-day taboo of wanting and performing sex and sexiness on its head. She’s practically a sex doll. And with her new bra, we can be too.
If, with their Dream campaign, Maidenform was selling the fantasy that women could be serious, powerful workers despite their sexiness, Kim, with her nipple bra, is selling the fantasy that women can be sexy despite their professionalism. If the SKIMS Ultimate Bra Nipple Push-Up Bra teaches us anything, it’s that our sexiness—not our skill, not our strength, not our brains—will solve the world’s problems. If you want our planet to survive long enough to see your children grow up, heed Kim’s advice, strap on a pair of Ultimate Push-Up Nipples and take your sexy ass to work.
