And it is clearly not a Japanese dress. Do names still mean anything?
Kim Kardashian enjoys many descriptions, but imaginative isn’t one of them. Case in point: her debut underwear line, just announced, is called Kimono. And many people are not charmed. It’s obvious the name is a play on her own moniker, but it also happens to be the traditional clothing of Japan. We can’t say for sure if there is cultural appropriation here, since there is no material component, but many people seem to consider it so—enough that #KimOhNo quickly emerged, within hours of her Instagram and Twitter announcements. However we see it, it is ignorant of the lawyer-in-training to think that Anglicised words no longer have provenance, meaning, or cultural connection.
To be fair, Mrs West (her Mr, too) has a penchant for unusual, un-name-like names, such as those for her kids (the latest, Psalm! Is that religious or musical appropriation?). A mother, we suppose, can name her children anything she wants. But a line of underclothes? That’s quite another matter, especially when lingerie, even post-Victoria’s Secret fashion shows, is still linked to something not quite as mundane as bras and panties, never mind if they are sold as “shapewear” and known to her as “solutions”. To call them by a name that is a national dress not related to the namer is understandably insensitive. It’s like a Korean wig-maker calling a new range of blond bobs Cornrows. Who’s buying—you, Kim K?
Photo: Vanessa Beecroft
Update (1 July 2019): Bowing to public outcry, Kim K has announced that she will not used the trademarked name Kimono for her shape wear brand. Watch this space for the next name that she will come up with
Style on the Dot 
[…] And now, a title associated with a hyper-conservative society that only very recently allowed women to drive and to travel abroad without consent from a male “guardian”. That Ms Kardashian is given the go-ahead to bare shoulders, arms, and cleavage is perhaps indication of creative output on her terms, rather than expression to test societal limits. Perhaps, to her, this is one way to encourage and empower the women of Saudi Arabia. Or, a chance to sell her “solutionwear”, now called Skims after the first disastrous naming exercise. […]
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[…] page. In the present, when the comments of influencers on their IG posts are big conversations and the poor naming of a celebrity’s “solutionswear” elicits emotional conversations, it is a little over-the-top that Vogue’s discourse on the […]
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[…] Kim Kardashian has introduced undie-looking masks for her shapewear brand Skims (formerly Kimono). I can understand the desire for a mask that matches a dress, but one that goes with undergarments […]
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[…] It is, of course, expected that she’d wear one to promote her own Skims line (initially called Kimono!), however successful it already is. The Balenciaga second skin needed the Skims for sure. So why […]
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[…] have to say I have never worn Skims (can you imagine it was initially called Kimono? 😲). The only shapewear I have tried (and I say tried because it was on me for, like, 15 […]
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[…] that it did not really enjoy a brilliant, uncontroversial start, at least in the initial naming of the brand. For reasons not clear, Ms Kardashian wanted to call her debut line ‘Kimono’, which […]
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