New York studio Rafael de Cárdenas has turned SKIMS‘ first UK flagship into a case for exposure, closing its fitting room corridor in glass instead of tucking it away. The store occupies a corner site at 245–247 Regent Street, spread across two levels within a stretch of London that architect John Nash laid out in 1810. Where most flagships treat the fitting room as the one private beat in an otherwise performative visit, this one puts it in full view of the street.
Spanning 12,000 square feet, the flagship is SKIMS’ first standalone European store and its third collaboration with Cárdenas, following his design for the brand’s Fifth Avenue flagship in New York in 2024. Rather than repeating that formula, the London store adapts it to Regent Street’s grander context, unfolding as a non-linear sequence of rooms that alternates compressed passages with wide-open product displays.
Visitors entering the store are met first by a monumental nude sculpture by artist Vanessa Beecroft, a frequent SKIMS collaborator, set within a curved partition beneath an oversized circular light well recessed into the ceiling. The disc doubles as a quiet nod to the London Underground roundel, giving the entrance a fixed point of orientation before the layout opens into looser, interconnected spaces organized loosely by lifestyle.
Throughout the store, softened edges and rounded forms carry a single material logic from room to room: glassine Corian, tonal Ultrasuede, and softly textured greige walls hold the palette close to skin tones. Apparel occupies the ground floor, sleepwear and intimates are kept upstairs, and pared-back cabinets double as low seating where cross-legged mannequins are staged rather than standing.
The upper-level fitting room corridor is where the store’s central idea lands hardest: floor-to-ceiling mirrors face directly onto Regent Street, turning the most private stretch of a retail visit into something closer to a performance for one of London’s busiest streets. Reflected inside are a smooth pink pouffe and the SKIMS logo engraved into the wall. Marking her first European store, Kim Kardashian described London as “one of the most inspiring fashion cities in the world” to her, calling the Regent Street opening especially exciting.
London is not SKIMS’ first attempt at translating its identity into physical space. In 2021, designer Willo Perrin conceived the brand’s first pop-up, a glossier space in Paris; more recently, SKIMS also collaborated with Crosby Studios on a Nike x SKIMS pop-up, also in Paris, pursuing a rougher language than Cárdenas’s curves. Set against those earlier experiments, the Regent Street flagship carries the same restrained material logic through to its smallest detail — the pink pouffe and engraved logo reflected in the fitting room glass.
SKIMS London Flagship by Rafael de Cárdenas, Ltd. | Location: 245–247 Regent Street, London — Year: 2026 — Key materials: glassine Corian, tonal Ultrasuede, greige plaster