Bangkok Bidder Would Have Paid up to $200,000 for Historic Levi’s Jeans
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They may look like just a dirty, tattered pair of pants, but jeans purported to be the oldest surviving Levi’s—dated to as old as 1873—sold at auction on Saturday for $100,000 to an anonymous bidder.
The pants were sold by vintage clothing collector Brit Eaton, who auctioned them at the Durango Vintage Festivus, an event he founded last year held in Aztec, New Mexico.
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This wasn’t Eaton’s first big denim sale. Last year at the first iteration of his Festivus, he auctioned a pair of Levi’s from 1890 for $76,000. That pair made headlines due to a racist statement printed on the inside pocket, declaring the jeans “the only kind made by White Labor,” a reference to the xenophobic Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States.
This year’s event also included a bulk sale with a 10,000-pound pile of vintage jeans that attendees paid to sift through and buy as many pairs as they wanted in a 10-minute period.
Eaton began collecting denim 25 years ago, scouring yard sales, basements and even mine shafts for old jeans.
“I’ve driven an average of 60,000 miles a year for 25 years, just going around knocking on doors all across the West, basically, and asking people if I can go look in their barn or their attic or whatever,” Eaton told The Journal of Durango, Colorado.
Eaton bought the 1873 Levi’s last year from Akira Tswuchida, a Japanese collector. Though they came with a hefty price tag, the jeans looked pretty rough, with part of the lower left leg missing and a patch covering a hole on the front right leg. The jeans have a single back pocket and a buckle back, a common design for Levi’s jeans produced before 1900. They were originally found 20 years ago in a Nevada mine by denim collector Michael Allen Harris.
The winning bidder explained why the more than century-old Levi’s jeans were worth the money, according to a video shared on Instagram.
In 1873, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis obtained a patent on the process of putting rivets in men’s work pants for the first time. Strauss, a dry goods merchant, and Davis, a tailor, partnered after the latter purchased cloth from the former to make his riveted pants, which were designed to last longer for laborers.
In recent years, vintage denim has grown in popularity, particularly among Gen Z consumers looking for pieces that satisfy their desires for nostalgia, sustainability and one-of-a-kind style. In 2020 in a bid to up its circularity cred, Levi’s launched its own buy-back program, Levi’s SecondHand, which allows consumers to receive a credit for vintage denim that can be resold.
Though Eaton set the auction reserve for the jeans at $150,000, the pants went for $50,000 less than he expected, although a far cry from the $3 they cost in 1873.
