Skims wants to bring back American Apparel's aesthetic Kim Kardashian's brand draws from the sexy and provocative imagery that made AA iconic

To launch its new collection of cotton basics, Skims, the shapewear brand founded by Kim Kardashian (which is reportedly about to collaborate with Fendi), has chosen Kourtney Kardashian and Megan Fox as its models. The images, with their saturated colors and minimal setting, portray the two friends on a neutral background, their toned and shiny bodies engaged in plastic poses, their provocative gaze turned towards the lens. In other images, it's Megan Fox who feeds Kardashian cherries, while in another there's only an apple between their mouths. Food seems to be a sort of leitmotif for Skims, which uses it as a scenic element to make simple pajamas look provocative - when worn while enjoying a plate of waffles, maple syrup, whipped cream, or a melted ice cream cone. It's precisely this revisited, elevated, glamorized, and kinky everyday life that brings Skims' visual communication so close to the advertising campaigns that made American Apparel and by extension Terry Richardson, who was often the author of those shots, famous. American Apparel had found a unique, high-impact style to tell the story of its aesthetic: the campaigns often consisted of simple, clean, almost documentary-like images, unretouched, photos taken in real houses or on monochrome sets, often portraying ordinary people, the brand's clients, street casting faces, and most of the time the models were photographed in provocative poses, almost pornographic. 

In a context like the current one, an American Apparel campaign would have been destroyed on social media within an hour, but on an aesthetic level the American brand has created an imagery, a model of communication so simple yet effective that it remains almost impossible to replicate.