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						Chromium Dumb Belle INFO
		At the launch party for Vivienne Westwood’s Opus last week, I spotted the most astonishing jacket……….and it wasn’t by Viv. Orchid purple satin……the old heavy kind……tiny and tight and featuring an enormous yellow and black satin head of a raccoon  atop a blue satin naked girl body……the girl wearing it told me it was by Chromium Dumb Belle. As the name was almost as good as the jacket I was intrigued enough to follow the trail that led me to Chromium Dumb Belle’s creator, Joanne Burke.  Jo first surfaced with a book of drawings of the wild and splendid Marchesa Luisa Casati. She followed this with Biba Dolls, endorsed by Barbara Hulanicki . It was Jo’s artwork in the book that inspired the s/s '07 London Fashion Week Show for Bella Freud’s newly re-launched Biba label…. ……….Eventually I caught up with Joanne in  a scruffy 30s semi in North London where she had set up a makeshift sewing room in the home of her friend and collaborator Moni Haworth.  -------------- DT:    What is Chromium Dumb Belle? JB:      Well, it’s whatever we want it to be at the time really, we don’t think of it as a clothes line, we make embroideries and stories to be worn on the body. Its definitely more costumey and not fashion led at all……….The first thing i made was just a little jacket with an elongated giantess walking thru some hills, inspired by a painting i remember my uncle made when I was younger. It was just made out of old scraps of 40s satin and chiffon I had laying about, was an experiment really.... MH    I remember you sending me the first pics of that…….it was so exciting…….I was in love with the whole look of it and was just nagging you to do more and more…. JB   Yeah the second thing was a satin dress I made for myself………I think that’s what started the whole thing really………we had both kind of exhausted the vintage stuff, we were mad on it for years, way before we met each other…and had kind of gone every which way with  it………I never found the things I had in my head. I had specific things in my head but i wasn’t sure if it existed really……More costume style stuff that was a mix of all my heroes and heroines and movies and songs. I knew I was never gonna find stuff like that in real life so I reckoned i would just have to try and make it. I’m not trained in clothes making and had never embroidered or appliqued before so everything is guess work! MH  Then Jo made me a dress for my birthday. Birthday Dress……..bits of old satin dresses mixed with 30s green velvet and snakeskin appliqués…..I couldn’t believe how well it fitted and how incredible it was. The best of vintage mixed with something completely new.  And once the first couple of things turned out so good, I wanted Jo to make a little kind of collection so we could do some great photos………it wasn’t like we were really thinking to sell them or anything, it was just almost for us wasn’t it?  DT:  How did you two meet? JB: Haahahah! We hated each other before we met ! We were both into the same vintage labels and so we were bidding against each other in auctions for a while...It was WAR!  MH:  I only knew her by her ebay ID………we used to outbid each other on all the Bus Stop stuff that came up….Nobody was even interested in BS at the time, it wasn’t as well heard of so it was just us two putting the prices up just cos we wanted to outdo each other...  JB: We loved the same clothes and films and lots more but we never knew it, its hilarious to think of the things i would say about her now, she’s the only person I could do CDB with …….  MH:  I saw Jo at a Vintage Fair in London…....I just saw through the crowds this outrageous looking girl with the longest legs and eyelashes in the world……huge platform shoes and the biggest best smile……..Oh my god and then I heard her voice, which is indescribable until you actually hear it and I was in Love. She was selling her Biba Dolls book like hotcakes and I couldn’t believe the gigantic size of it!  JB: And i remember this super confident husky voiced whippet lady coming at me in platform boots...showing me some old trashed Biba leopard-skin jacket she had just gotten with cigarette burns, it was the same jacket Arthur Kane had in the NY Dolls actually...well anyway, we became best of friends after that and laughed like hell when we realised we’d been fighting each other for ebay stuff all those years before.... DT:  Who comes up with the ideas? MH.  Oh well Jo always knows what she’s going to do next……….she has so many ideas it sometimes hurts because it’s kind of like a pressure to do them all and they keep on piling up and up in her head………but I always get what she means and feels when she gets onto something. I love finding pics or old books or films that kind of go with what she’s doing……..then as the work progresses we get to thinking about the photos so we can kind of commemorate the work!  It’s incredibly easy to photograph Jo’s gear because of the colours and the stories that the pieces have come from……….and some like Mayerling don’t even need a scene or anything because they’re so larger than life and such big colour. JB. I suggest an idea to Moni and she just reaffirms what I’m thinking, she just runs with it and we discuss ideas for photos or new pieces...we build each other up really i guess...encourage each others ideas and make them better...
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