One afternoon in 1988, Cher was rehearsing in a Los Angeles recording studio when a guy with wild, curly hair and a stern face dropped by. Richard Stark had recently started a brand called Chrome Hearts, which made jewelry, clothes, and accessories for bikers and rock stars, and he was doing the old-school version of influencer marketing: riding his Harley around town and seeing if famous people would buy his gear.
There were plenty of brands selling heavy-metal motorcycle jackets and rocker jewelry in those days, but Stark, a headstrong and clever leather wholesaler from Utica, New York, had a more luxurious vision for the genre. Through his job working with tanneries, he had access to superthick hides normally used in upholstery, so he’d been tooling around in his Hollywood garage for a few years, making sturdy jackets he and his buddies would wear on their bikes. Thanks to a friend who worked in fashion production, the jackets were beautifully made, but the real breakthrough came when Stark and a jeweler added custom silver hardware—sterling studs, zipper pulls, and biker cross embellishments. Suddenly, a Chrome Hearts jacket would not only save your ass if you crashed your Harley but it might also get you a table at Spago.
Stark would soon become one of the most influential celebrity clothiers of his time, but in 1988, in that studio with Cher, only he knew it. “We were in a rehearsal hall,” Cher recalls by phone. “And some weird guy comes in, all leathered out, and he had a guitar strap with him.” The guitar strap, Cher says, was gorgeous: thick black leather, with baroque silver-filigree work. The only problem? Stark wanted $5,000, about double what an Hermès Birkin cost at the time. “I thought, Who is this crazy guy? I’ve never heard of him, and he wants $5,000 for a guitar strap?”
Cher sent him packing. But something about the encounter lingered in her mind. “I remembered that the workmanship on the strap,” she recalls, “was extraordinary.” She also marveled at something else: the conviction it must have taken for a relative nobody to walk into her studio and try to sell her a $5,000 guitar strap. Maybe Stark wasn’t weird at all. Maybe, she thought, he was kind of cool.
Three decades later, Richard Stark’s scrappy operation has defied haters, trends, and even conventional business logic to become an unlikely fashion empire, with 34 stores and over 1,000 employees around the world. Though Chrome Hearts doesn’t comment on sales figures or its financials, its pop--culture capital is easy to quantify. Cher, in fact, became one of the brand’s most high-profile supporters when she realized she needed a leather jacket to wear in the music video for “The Shoop Shoop Song.” She called Stark and he hand-delivered a western-fringe, quilted-leather moto jacket the next day. The design, Cher says, was beautiful—an embodiment of the brand’s intriguing combination of, as she describes it, “haute couture and Hells Angels.”
Cher has been a loyal fan ever since, a leader of an exceptionally diverse and fervent celebrity cult following that over the years has included, among many others, Lou Reed, Drake, Nicolas Cage, Bella Hadid, Dennis Rodman, The Weeknd, Damien Hirst, and fashion luminaries like Rei Kawakubo, Rick Owens, Virgil Abloh, and Karl Lagerfeld. Biker gear is now just a small part of the Chrome Hearts universe: The brand makes everything from hoodies to ski goggles to handbags to crystal glassware to tufted-leather couches to funky novelties like ebony toilet plungers and sterling single-slice lemon squeezers. “I don’t think we’re making money on that lemon squeezer,” says Richard’s wife and business partner, Laurie Lynn Stark. “But it’s sick.”
Though it was never part of the plan, Richard, Laurie Lynn, and their three children have become fashion-world celebrities. “We never wanted to be famous designers. We wanted to be successful artists,” says Laurie Lynn, who says her kids freaked out when Drake name-dropped her in a song.” Celebrities, in turn, come to the Starks to realize their most over-the-top and luxurious flexes. Many are led by 18-year-old Kristian Stark, who introduced Chrome Hearts to the likes of Young Thug and Lil Uzi Vert, like his parents introduced the brand to the Sex Pistols and Guns N’ Roses. When Odell Beckham Jr. caught his first postseason touchdown pass during the 2022 NFL playoffs, he did so wearing Nike wide receiver gloves emblazoned with blue-and-yellow-leather biker crosses, an unofficial collab executed in Chrome Hearts’ Hollywood atelier. When Drake bought a new Rolls-Royce Cullinan, he called on Chrome Hearts to redesign it down to the leather floor mats. Why? Zack Bia, the 25-year-old DJ, Drake consigliere, and friend of Kristian, puts it this way: “Chrome Hearts is one of the greatest brands on earth.”
Which is strange, because Chrome Hearts doesn’t seem particularly well suited to capture the current fashion zeitgeist. Fashion has moved light-years beyond the heavy baroque-biker aesthetic that took off in the ’90s, and most brands associated with that polarizing movement (Von Dutch, Ed Hardy) fell off a cliff during the aughts. But Chrome Hearts has stayed true to burnished metal and leather crosses, fleurs-de-lis, and daggers that in any other context read as outdated, even tacky.
It’s also not particularly easy to buy Chrome Hearts. The company is one of few in the luxury sector without a permanent e-commerce shop, and it doesn’t advertise or publish collection images on its website. Your best bet to figure out what the brand is making at any given time, and to get your hands on it, is to go to a Chrome Hearts retail store—if you can find one. Most of the brand’s stores operate like if-you-know-you-know clubhouses, with little in the way of external signage. And the prices, which can hit the upper five digits for fine jewelry, are still as jaw-dropping as they were when Stark was slinging guitar straps.
“I have to tell you, a lot of people didn’t believe,” Cher says about Chrome Hearts in the beginning. Most people, early on, she explains, reacted to Stark’s quixotic project basically the same way she did. “They would go, ‘Oh, that’s just some guy making leather.’ ” The fashion industry still seems unsure of what to make of Chrome Hearts—despite its deeply American aesthetic, the brand wasn’t included in The Met’s recent Americana-themed Costume Institute exhibition. But it’s getting harder to ignore or write off Chrome Hearts. “Richard had a dream,” Cher says. “And it wasn’t to be ‘just some guy making leather.’ ”
You’d think that after Chrome Hearts turned him into an exceptionally rich man, Richard Stark would allow himself a bit of a break. But most days he wakes up in Malibu, where the Starks reportedly own several houses, well before dawn. By 5 a.m. he’s on his Harley, which he guns down the PCH to their factory, which spans three blocks in the center of Hollywood. He has a hangar-size office in one of the complex’s many buildings, but he can usually be found on the floor working with the hundreds of craftspeople he employs—perhaps the only head of a luxury brand who spends most of his time actually making stuff.
“I’m all over this place,” Stark, 61, tells me via FaceTime. He rarely gives interviews, preferring to let the brand speak for itself. Stark, who trained as a carpenter before getting into the leather business, is hard of hearing from a lifetime of being around motorcycles, rock shows, and screaming machine tools, so when we spoke, I mostly FaceTimed with his ear canal. I did manage to catch a few glimpses of his outfit, which is what he’s been wearing every day for years: a leather jacket, a quilted liner vest, and leather pants, flared to fit over his boots. “When you ride a motorcycle, you kind of wear the same shit,” he says. It was only noon, and Stark had already been in four different workshops that morning.
Practically every Chrome Hearts product, save for cashmere sweaters, emerges from this factory, which is really a network of buildings that sprawl outward from the garage where the brand started. One building houses a woodshop, another a silver shop. There’s also an eyewear shop, a graphics shop, and a stone-setting shop. Every time a building in the neighborhood comes up for sale, Richard and Laurie Lynn buy it, even if they don’t know what they’re going to use the space for. The campus continues growing because Chrome Hearts is growing faster than they can keep up with. While on a recent trip to the London shop located in the Selfridges department store, Laurie Lynn tells me she was shocked to discover that the shelves were empty—2021, she says, was one of their best years ever. The factory has sometimes had to run 24 hours a day just to keep the stores (10 of which are located in Japan) stocked.
Because of the massive demand, prices on the secondary market for Chrome Hearts gear, particularly limited-edition and made-to-order styles, are out of control. Pairs of vintage Levi’s customized by Chrome Hearts with sterling-silver hardware and leather cross patches are currently a better investment than gold. Vincent Ferraro, who runs the fashion showroom 4Gseller in New York, tells me he sold over $100,000 worth of Chrome Hearts jeans in February alone. The brand’s best clients generally get first crack at rare pieces, and only the best of the best are invited to order custom items. “People who get custom Chrome, it’s like a Ferrari. You can’t really just walk in and buy a Ferrari,” says Ferraro, who recently listed a pair of Chrome Hearts jeans, purportedly made for Drake, for $69,225. “It’s insane,” Ferraro says of the exorbitant prices Chrome Hearts gear commands on sites like Grailed. “But it’s not a fluke. The numbers are there.”
When Richard Stark agreed to speak with me, it was not because he wanted to talk about himself or the brand’s recent success. Incredibly private and press shy, Stark “never reveals too much of himself, ever,” says friend and Chrome Hearts client, the artist Marina Abramovic´. Rather, he wanted to talk about his family: Laurie Lynn, who joined the business in 1994, and their three children. “I started Chrome Hearts to be a 150-year-old company,” Richard says. “You need a family to make that happen.” And now, after spending countless mornings covered in sawdust on the factory floor, his soul patch is going gray. He’s got succession on his mind.
On a winter afternoon, I met the crisp and businesslike Laurie Lynn at the Chrome Hearts West Village flagship, where you’re greeted by a 10-foot-tall leather brontosaurus. Up a monumental ebony staircase is the Starks’ unofficial East Coast clubhouse, a warehouse-like room filled with more crosses than the Vatican. Kristian was padding around in thrashed Chuck Taylors and voluminous leather trousers. His twin sister, Frankie Belle, was doing homework at a dining table with a few art-school classmates. Jesse Jo, the Starks’ eldest, was in London, where she moved to record an album. I was told not to try to pet the family dog Chicken Nugget, a tiny white Maltese mix who bites. “All three kids have style,” says Laurie Lynn. “I don’t know how that happened. Some people have three brainiac kids who all go to Harvard. These kids are all stylish.”
On my way in, I found a zip-up hoodie made out of heavy leather hanging on one of the racks. It had a solid-silver zipper pull and a thick quilted lining. Upstairs, I mentioned it to Kristian, who’s got a surfer’s tan and a chill demeanor to match. As it turns out, he designed it—at the tender age of 10. The truth is, Kristian didn’t think Chrome Hearts was cool when he was growing up. “When I was younger, I used to wear hoodies, sweats around the house,” Kristian says. “I wasn’t, like, in it.” But he needed a jacket for rides on the back of his dad’s Harley, so one day Richard and Kristian went to the factory and made a moto version of his favorite hoodie. Then they made 50 more and sent them to stores, where they quickly sold out.
A lot of Chrome Hearts gear sells out almost as soon as it hits the shelves, but Kristian seems to have a golden touch when it comes to designing piping-hot clothing. When guys like Offset, Drake, Travis Scott, and Lil Uzi Vert wear Chrome Hearts, they don’t look like bikers—they look more like Kristian, because they wear the cross-emblazoned jeans and carpenter pants that he developed with Matt DiGiacomo, a Malibu-bred artist who has his own custom atelier at the factory. It’s no coincidence that most of the products Kristian works on are the ones that sell for many times their retail price on Grailed. Kristian, perhaps by virtue of his young age, has an instinctual sense of what the young, rich, and famous want to wear.
Intentionally or not, Kristian has helped Chrome Hearts execute an extraordinarily delicate pivot. In recent years, Chrome Hearts—like the rest of the luxury industry—has had to reach a new generation of social-media-savvy, status-obsessed consumers (like Zack Bia) without alienating their older, loyal customers (like Cher). Thanks to the enormous amount of hype generated when guys like Drake wear Chrome Hearts, the brand hasn’t had to reinvent itself at all. The ’90s are back in style, and so is Chrome Hearts. “One of the things I love is when parents are like, ‘Man, my kid’s stealing all my Chrome Hearts stuff,’ ” says Richard. “I’m like, ‘Well, the good news about that is you’re hip.’ ”
One day, the new generation will have to decide just how big they want to let Chrome Hearts get. When we spoke, the Starks were preparing to open five more stores over the next two years, including a Jean Nouvel renovation on Quai Voltaire in Paris that will include an art gallery. They’re also thinking about how to take their universe-building to the next level. “Rentables,” says Laurie Lynn, “small buildings” that will be Chromed-out down to the hinges. “The only thing we don’t make right now is coffee machines.” In order to keep up with demand, they’ve established an artisan training program at the factory and have plans to open a new production facility in Italy.
But the Chrome Hearts business model can only expand so much. The Starks acknowledge that they’re leaving enormous amounts of money on the table in doing things like making sterling lemon squeezers in Hollywood, when they could be doing things like selling warehouses full of foreign-made Chrome Hearts x Drake hoodies online. Massive luxury conglomerates, too, have come bearing pallets loaded with cash for an acquisition. But Chrome Hearts is a family business in the purest sense: All five Starks have to sign off on every decision. And it seems set to remain a family business for at least one more generation. When Laurie Lynn mentions that some of the offers they’ve received for the company have been “great,” Kristian quickly shuts down the conversation: “I don’t want to sell.”
Richard views Kristian’s eventual ascension to the head of the business as a matter of destiny. “All three of my kids love it, but Kristian especially,” he says. When I ask Richard where he sees the brand going, he moves the phone so I can see his face. One day, he tells me, when Kristian was about 13, Richard and Marina Abramovic´ were hanging out in the kitchen of the Starks’ house in Malibu. Kristian walked by, and Abramovic´ asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. (Kristian vividly remembers his response: “I was like, ‘I’m going to take over the family business.’ ”) As Richard recalls the story, his eyes appear to get a little misty. “When that happened, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s great. Chrome Hearts has got a chance of being a 150-year-old family business now.’ ”
Production Credits:
Sittings editor, Tori Leung
Hair by Mitchell Ramazon/Mane Addicts
Makeup by Dotti at Statement Artists
Shot at Chrome Hearts, West Village, New York.
