Skims x Royal Marines when? A woman named Angelina Wiley has claimed that Skims saved her life during a near-fatal shooting in Kansas City earlier this year. Dressed in one of Kim Kardashian’s shaping bodysuits, Wiley was shot four times while waiting for a Lyft on January 1. “It was so tight on me that it literally kept me from bleeding out,” she explained in a TikTok, before comparing the underwear to “body armour for women.” So dedicated is Kim in her commitment to compressing the body into hourglass silhouettes, that Skims’ heavy-bonded technology actually managed to stem a lethal haemorrhage. 

Though critics are quick to chastise Kim’s pursuit of profit, Skims has become a fixture in women’s wardrobes not because of its connection to the Kardashians but because its products actually work. There is a reason why fans of the brand compare its undergarments to gun holsters, hoisting the flesh into assertive and self-confident silhouettes. And though military gear harbours all sorts of controversial connotations – warfare, policing, the long arm of the law – girdles and corselets and bandeaus are quite cute, the girl dinners of tactical uniforms. All cops are bastards… but a policeman in a sculpting waist trainer? Somehow a little more palatable. 

“Kim Kardashian saved my life,” Wiley – who has been left with a ruptured bladder, a cracked pelvis, and a bullet still lodged in her abdomen – said. “Call it fate, or Jesus, but I’mma call it Kim for sure.” The Kardashian reshared Wiley’s TikTok to her Instagram stories alongside a “wowwww” but fans are now fans are hounding Kim to cast her in an upcoming campaign or donate heavily to her GoFundMe page. This organic piece of marketing – that not even Kris Jenner could cook up – is bound to be a boon to Skims’ sales and Kim’s public profile, which has been leaning evermore noble now that she’s training to be a lawyer and leading a pro-bono prison reform machine.