Guide to Chrome Hearts clothing - Includes some finds and sellers.
Introduction:
tl;dr - Don't buy complex CH items. Stick to basic shirts and hoodies that do not feature embroidery and leather.
Chrome Hearts is a brand that sees a lot of traction around here, but there isn't much discussion about what makes reps good or bad and what to look for in clothing. Jewlery is pretty well discussed at this point, but clothing has not been broken down. This post aims to point out what to look for in quality checks, identify some sellers who will hopefully do Chrome well, point out production problems in CH reps, and clear up misconceptions.
Production (Why most CH reps are bad):
Production is by far one of the most complicated issues in CH reps. Tees and hoodies to some extent can be reliably repped, and done well for that matter, but the desirable items from CH have not been. Why? This can mostly be attributed to materials. CH's best items are made of wool, cashmere, silver, leather, and complex embroidery. These materials have a high cost naturally and are incredibly complex to work with. In other words, it's a logistical nightmare to even begin the process of accurately repping a chrome piece. In addition, unlike Prada, there are not a handful of factories pre-making necessary hardware. The silver buttons, plaques, and leather crosses must be done in house or a skilled third-party must be contracted out to handle them. Essentially, all but the best sellers are even capable of approaching Chrome's most desirable pieces.
Quality Check Guide:
With materials and production in mind, let's begin the process of doing an accurate quality check or review. First of all, let's examine screen printed items that can reasonably be repped by most sellers. The standard checks are still the same. Outside of the standard checks on measurements, weight, and stitching -
Printing size, placement, color accuracy, and quality should be examined and compared to retail. In addition, these need to be checked PER SIZE.
Many sellers (even including well respected sellers such as LY) have cut corners by doing a single size accurately, then copy and pasting the results to all other sizes which causes issues with placement or print scale on some sizes. Be careful!
For more complex items checks are more difficult as material quality can only be examined in hand. However -
Check embroidery accuracy and placement, examine hardware for defects, check leather quality visually.
Most embroidery reps leave much to be desired. Get close up photos and check for uniformity in the embroidery and the smoothness of edges. In leather, CH crosses have raw edges which when seen close up can be used to identify the grain and quality. Reference here:
When buying leather items or items including leather accents, it is important that you understand leather quality and how to care for it. There are plenty of guides online that outline identifying leather grain.
Tags:
Small note before we continue. Tags are not done well on CH reps and most likely they will not be. Modern CH reps feature a thread on their tags that when examined closely shows a specific pattern, I've yet to see it used in reps. As a buyer you should not be looking for "1:1 tags". For personal use, tags are essentially irrelevant.
Courtesy of the mods over at chromeheartlc
Seller Identification:
So, you may be wondering who you can trust to do good reps. I can't tell you someone is going to produce a perfect rep, but I can tell you what to look for in a trustworthy seller and a few who have done things right in the past. A seller being listed here doesn't mean that every item listed is good, it's just a good place to begin your search. Some sellers are respected on FR and are not listed here, it's for a reason but the point of this post isn't to flame sellers. If you follow the guide, you'll come to the same conclusion anyways without naming names.
First of all, accurate independent sellers (which is not to say that factory batches can't make good CH tees) generally have a Chinese facing blog. IE - a Weibo account or similar. Sellers that don't have one usually don't for a reason and are not respected domestically for a reason.
Secondly, most sellers producing accurate items are showing off their items compared to retail (often labelled Z or ZP). This is known as "copywriting" and doesn't guarantee the rep is good but it does mean the seller is confident enough to use comparisons as advertisement. Blogs will often show fabric quality and color compared to retail as seen here -
Painter - Color check against retail
Some links to sellers:
Painter (CH in production): https://shop1726292889.v.weidian.com/?userid=1726292889
777: https://weidian.com/?userid=1765204812
Red Rabbit (CH in production): https://shop1628880569.v.weidian.com/?userid=1628880569
Again, these links do not mean you should blindly purchase whatever is in stock and assume it is good. I can't say it enough so - CHECK QUALITY ON A PER ITEM BASIS AND DO YOUR OWN DUE DILIGENCE. Bad sellers can sometimes do a good item and good sellers can sometimes do a terrible job. This is why good reviews are so important as a community.
End note:
That should hopefully go over most of what to look for in CH reps. I'm happy to answer any questions. For those interested I can provide weibo links to these sellers so you can view their blogs.