“I just think we are in a big artistic zone for everybody,” Jesse Jo Stark, daughter of Chrome Hearts founder Richard Stark, says of the brand’s factory in Hollywood. She’s right: factory, although technically the correct term, feels like a misnomer: inside you’ll find a music rehearsal studio, a kitchen, a living space with couches, and countless amounts of clothing racks within the warehouse which stretches three Los Angeles city blocks. Want to work, relax, or create? There’s a space for you—all done in Chrome Hearts’ signature rock ’n’ roll aesthetic. “Everything is pretty Chromed out,” says Jesse Jo.
In a new video, the Stark women—including Jesse Jo, Frankie Belle, and their mother and Chrome Hearts co-owner Laurie Lynn Stark—give us a tour of the brand’s factories and their favorite objects within. For Laurie Lynn, that’s a self-portrait with late artist John Baldessari where she appears to pick her nose. (She also has a soft spot for her European tea set: “My grandmother used to serve me tea, and I decided that was something of my childhood that I wanted to carry through,” she says.)
Jesse Jo, meanwhile, treasures a coffin-shaped jewelry box that her father personally designed for her. Inside? Love letters—from flames past and present—as well as pictures of her dog.
The women also have their favorite fashion designs too. Frankie Bell, who has her a swimsuit line that she produces in the factory, shows the emotional details she put into a newspaper-print bikini. Meanwhile, Jesse Jo shares the inspiration behind Chrome Hearts’s Sugar Jones boots. The musician couldn’t find a pair of boots that fit her on-stage persona. “I wanted to feel like a feline on stage and be able to stop and feel powerful. I didn’t have that shoe yet,” she says. So under her creative direction, Chrome Hearts made them. “They’re my second skin—I don’t play a show without them.”
