The Monaco paddock has seen royalty, oligarchs, and every flavor of celebrity money since the race was first run in 1929. But when Kim Kardashian walked through the gates at Circuit de Monaco last weekend, it wasn’t just another famous face in the principality. It was a business signal — and Formula 1, Kimi Antonelli, and Mercedes would be foolish to miss it.
The narrative being sold to the general public is a love story. Reality television’s most recognizable name is dating the most decorated driver in Formula 1 history. Lewis Hamilton, seven-time world champion, Denver Broncos so-owner, and recent Barcelona GP winner, now in scarlet red at Ferrari. And Kim Kardashian, founder of a $4 billion shapewear empire, SKIMS. Together, photographed at the Super Bowl, biking through New York, and dining in Paris.
Romantic? Sure. But the more interesting story isn’t what’s happening between them. It’s what could happen between their brands.
The Blueprint Already Exists
Kim Kardashian did not stumble into modern sports marketing. She engineered it.
In October 2023, SKIMS announced a multi-year partnership with the NBA, WNBA, and USA Basketball, becoming the official underwear partner for all three. The announcement generated over 90 million impressions and $1.8 million in social value within days. The SKIMS Men launch, fronted by NBA star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, NFL lineman Nick Bosa, and soccer icon Neymar Jr., demonstrated that the brand had the range to operate across sports, demographics, and continents simultaneously.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver called SKIMS “one of our most culturally influential brands.” That is not the language of a league reluctantly accepting a sponsorship check. That is a league recognizing that the brand’s cultural gravity moves audiences.
SKIMS followed the NBA deal by outfitting Team USA for the Paris 2024 Olympics. The brand now has a documented track record of converting sports partnerships into sustained visibility among audiences that traditional sports advertisers have always struggled to reach: women, younger consumers, and the culturally disengaged.
Formula 1 has been aggressively courting exactly those audiences for years.
What Ferrari Brings to the Table
Ferrari is not a racing team that happens to sell merchandise. It’s a luxury brand that happens to race.
Ferrari isn’t chasing fashion credibility, it already has it. With Ferrari Style shows at Milan Fashion Week, a Giorgio Armani collaboration, an expanded Ray-Ban partnership, fourteen stores worldwide with New York and Miami locations incoming, and a creative director in Rocco Iannone whose mandate is building a full luxury fashion house around one of the most recognizable logos on earth. The Prancing Horse has been doing the work quietly for years. Hamilton’s arrival in red just turned up the volume.
Ferrari’s brand value grew from $4 billion in 2014 to over $7.1 billion within five years, climbing Brand Finance’s most valuable luxury brands ranking from 350th to 7th in that same window. The team isn’t chasing fashion credibility. It already has it.
Lewis Hamilton accelerated that positioning the moment he signed his contract. Hamilton has been one of Formula 1’s most credible fashion voices for over a decade — front row at Paris Fashion Week, Met Gala co-chair in 2025, a wardrobe that fashion editors have covered with the same intensity as his race results. His arrival at Ferrari was, in fashion terms, as significant as in sporting terms.
Now add Kim Kardashian to that equation.
The Case for SKIMS x Ferrari/Formula 1
The brand logic is almost uncomfortably clean.
Ferrari’s palette is red — specifically, a red so trademarked and iconic that it operates as a logo in itself. SKIMS built its visual identity around skin tones, neutrals, and body-inclusive design — the anti-logo brand. Together, they would produce contrast. Ferrari’s aggressive Italian luxury heritage against SKIMS’ American accessibility ethos. That tension is exactly where interesting collaborations are born.
SKIMS has already shown it can translate its aesthetic into athletic contexts without losing brand coherence. The Team USA Olympics collection was not shapewear dipped in patriotism, it was a product line built for performance that happened to carry the SKIMS DNA. A Ferrari collaboration would demand the same discipline: performance-adjacent product that can live in the paddock without looking like a costume.
The product categories write themselves. Racing-inspired bodywear. A capsule collection timed to the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. Limited-edition Rosso Corsa colorways on SKIMS’ best-selling lines. Paddock-to-party pieces (such as technical bodysuits with satin pants) that function for the paddock-to-party woman. Kim Kardashian has made an entire career understanding what women want to wear, and how to sell apparel or solutions to her.
The distribution story matters too. Ferrari is actively expanding its retail footprint in the United States, with New York and Miami stores confirmed. SKIMS operates as a direct-to-consumer powerhouse with a loyal, conversion-driven customer base. A collaboration would give Ferrari access to SKIMS’ customer data and digital-first reach, and in-store product placement in Skims stores and retail partners, such as Nordstrom. It would give SKIMS the aspirational luxury halo it has been quietly building toward since the NBA deal proved the brand could play in serious sporting arenas.
The Taylor Swift Parallel, And Where It Diverges
When Taylor Swift began attending Kansas City Chiefs games in September 2023, the NFL’s viewership among girls aged 12 to 17 jumped 53% almost overnight. Women 35 and older were up 34%. Female viewership reached its highest recorded level since the NFL began tracking the metric in 2000. Swift didn’t just bring her audience, she brought the infrastructure of her cultural moment with her.
Kim Kardashian is not Taylor Swift, and she is not attempting to be. Swift’s impact on the NFL was powered by a singular, generational fanbase with the organizational coherence of a movement. Swifties didn’t merely watch Chiefs games. They merchandised, they organized, and they converted.
Kardashian’s cultural reach operates differently; broader in some respects, shallower in others. Her 360 million Instagram followers are not a mobilized army. They are an audience. The distinction matters when projecting impact.
But Formula 1 isn’t the NFL. The NFL didn’t need Taylor Swift to survive. It was already the dominant sports property in American television. F1, by contrast, is still in the middle of its American growth story — a sport that was largely invisible to casual US viewers before ‘Drive to Survive’ landed on Netflix in 2019, and has been methodically building mainstream penetration since. A Taylor Swift-level bump would be extraordinary, but a consistent, sustained lift in fashion and entertainment media coverage across race weekends is achievable. And for a sport at this stage of its American expansion, it may be more valuable.
Swift has brought casual fans to the NFL for a few seasons, but that could start to fade when her fiancé, Travis Kelce retires. Kim could bring fashion editors, entertainment journalists, and SKIMS customers to F1 for years — not because they love racing or understand it, but because the paddock has become a place worth covering on its own terms.
The Bottom Line
Formula 1 is in a genuine cultural moment — one that the sport’s commercial leadership is keenly aware of, and working urgently to extend. Monaco was sponsored by Louis Vuitton this year. Ferrari is showing at Milan Fashion Week. The paddock has become a front row in its own right.
Kim Kardashian walking into the Ferrari garage is not just a celebrity cameo. It is a proof of concept. She has already demonstrated that SKIMS can be the official brand of American sports at the highest level. Ferrari has already demonstrated that it intends to be a serious luxury fashion house, not merely a racing team with a gift shop.
The infrastructure for a landmark brand collaboration exists on both sides. The cultural moment is live. The audience is watching.
The only question is whether the people running these businesses are paying attention.
Vanessa Castro is a journalist, startup co-founder, media entrepreneur, and founder of The Avant Ivy, a digital media outlet with readership across 70+ countries. She covers Formula 1, geopolitics, and the business of sport.
