Everything You Need to Know About Buying Vintage Jeans

Vintage might be having a moment now, but it's had moments before: like, say, 30 years ago, when used jeans went for good money in Russia and everyone knew they did. It was like that until the Berlin Wall fell. American jeans, mostly Levi’s 501s, were contraband until 1990. It was instantly understandable and also pretty strange that a thing at a regular price somewhere was incredibly expensive somewhere else. Understandable since that’s the guiding principle behind all markets, but strange since … stonewashed jeans? Really? In the past few years, thanks to Instagram, it’s become clear that many other ordinary pieces of Americana can also be expensive. Rotting sneakers from the back of a store, dead stock, are worth multiples in Japan—and Los Angeles; a Champion sweatshirt from Savers is a few thousand online; a grandma cardigan even more. Objects that are nothing at first blush might be valuable, and are hidden everywhere. Knowing these jewels are just lying around makes the material world a little psychedelic.

Politics determined demand in Russia as much as taste did. Régis Debray, a French political philosopher, student of Althusser and one-time homie with Che Guevara, said there was “more power in blue jeans and rock and roll than the entire Red Army.” He...might have been right? 501s were what people wore in America to vote or buy burgers or guitars. That’s what Russians wanted. A young woman named Alla who grew up in Moscow in the 1980s—we met on the F train a couple Thursdays ago—told me as much. Alla and her friends would queue at McDonald’s all day and leave with maybe an apple pie. She said the only people who wore jeans were Americans, and that the rich Russians wore tracksuits. Which wasn’t entirely true: some Russians bought jeans, others sold them. A pair of currency traders, Timofeyevich Rokotov and Vladislav Faibishenko, were executed for “leading a parasitic life and enriching themselves through the benefits created by working people,” in 1961; among the charges levied against them by the post-Stalin regime was importing blue jeans.

This unbridled lust for freedom pants meant that a pair of Levi’s bought in south Chicago, where an African-American like Clyde Ross could not get a mortgage on a house, represented, in Russia, something that America didn't actually live up to. Even so: you could bring a duffel bag of Levi’s to Moscow, and it’d pay for the flight and trip. (I am not sure how an English speaker would sell 40 pairs of jeans in Russia without a great deal of either charisma or tradecraft.) That conceit made it onto television in the 1980s when the kids on Head of the Class, a sitcom about gifted and funny Manhattan high school students, travelled to Russia to compete in an academic decathlon. Head was the first American sitcom to film in the Soviet Union, which merited a New York Times story. The kids find out they’re going to Russia, and Dennis, the prankster with nice hair who is good at physics, pawns his dad’s golf clubs to buy Levi’s 501s to re-sell. When he tries to sneak the jeans onto the plane with the A-V equipment, he gets exposed by the principal, Dr. Samuels. The episode doesn’t solve whether Dennis’ dad’s golf clubs sold at the pawn shop or not.

So Levi’s have been a common shorthand for vintage clothing’s trippy value for longer than many of us have been alive. But not all old jeans are worth money and only some are worth buying. So which ones? Here are a handful of ways to start thinking about the problem.

Some Rules of Thumb

Did you maybe just step on Hot Wheels, say in your office kitchen? Before you scream, check their wheels: a red line means they’re worth money. So too for Levi’s and other mid-century jeans. Red-tab Levi’s produced before 1982 have that red line, a selvedge, on the fabric’s outseam. It’s a cosmetic touch, but one that indicates an era of high production standards. Levi’s made before 1971 have a capital E on the butt tab. There are smaller tells, too: a tag made of leather, or with a serif font; rivets on the inside of the pockets—the more rusted and dark the better. Single stitching on the coin pocket and extra stitching on back pockets can round a pair of jeans off to within a year or two. If there are numbers or letters on the inside of the top fly button, look them up—they correspond to mills or factories, which helps date the pant. (The best factories are gone; Levi's Valencia plant in San Francisco’s Mission closed in 2002.) Fonts on the care labels denote decades and a union-made stamp or logo means both sound business practices and pants which are less likely to rip. There are also reverse tells, like bell-bottom openings, rhinestones, or tags in Spanish or French, which are post-NAFTA. Those things mean the jeans aren’t that old.

Fit Matters

A jean’s fit explains when it was made. Prewar (second) jeans were typically worn over gym clothes (wool pants) or over long johns, generally by coal miners and farmers. Old jeans, like the Carhartts at Dave’s now, were baggier, and had suspender buttons, since people wore those back then. The manual labour association meant jeans couldn’t be worn in fancy restaurants. Wearing jeans to the 1920s equivalent of a mall—a gazebo?—would be like putting on snow pants to Midnight Mass: practical, but disrespectful. Jeans a hundred years ago were also short, since people were too. So if you find skinnies at a flea market, they’re not that old. If you want your old jeans to be skinny, become friends with a tailor.

Materials Matter, Maybe Even More

Jeans are like fruit: you should touch them. Mangling the inventory helps develop a tactile literacy in the long term and in the short term ensures you don’t go home with a lemon. (Ignore if you’re buying lemons.) A jean passes the touch test if it’s heavy: thick prison jeans and Carhartts don’t feel that different than old Levi’s if you have your eyes closed. Nice reproduction jeans, like Levi’s Vintage Collection and Lee Retros, feel quality.

Find a Good Knockoff

Levi’s is the most significant denim company in the world; Lee's comes after that. Big box stores aped those two brands’ designs for their house lines—and sometimes improved on them. JC Penney’s Foremost jeans are one of my favorites. They show up often and can be found in really good, almost new, condition regularly. There are no embellishments on the back pockets and they have a special blue shade, almost Yves Klein, in new condition. Which is great. Penney’s stridently workwear line, Big Mac, was best known for colorful flannel plaid shirts, but also excelled at carpenter pants. Sears made Ranchcraft and Towncraft, the former closer to westernwear and the latter, by the 70s, disco. Both are fine. There is a wonderful assortment of small regional brands, like Big Buck in the south, and GWG in Canada, that cluster by their origin of production. The pleasant distinctions of regional denim make vintage shopping the smellier and more poorly-lit equivalent to birding.

Mistakes Happen—Take Advantage

In Williamsburg a few years ago I found a pair of deadstock, with tags, 1990 retro pre-LVC 501s from the Levi’s Valencia factory for $40. This was at a vintage store that had everything else priced either correctly or exorbitantly. The jeans looked identical to a new pair on a shelf at Dave’s: dark denim, not rigid, paper tags, sizing sticker. Five minutes looking at the jean: selvedge on the ankle, a top button with a 555, which means the Valencia factory, a Big E on the butt, copper (I think) rivets, no LVC branding on the care tag. A handful of details triangulated a nondescript pair of Levi’s to one a mid-1990s pair produced to retro 1940s specifications before LVC. I sold the jeans for $500 and the store is now out of business.

If You Don’t Even Want To Think About It

It is nice to go to vintage stores and flea markets and swap meets every weekend, or to spend an hour a day on eBay looking for clothes, but it’s perfectly acceptable to not do that. If you want a great pair of vintage jeans that are not very expensive and fit modern, here's my simplest recommendation: Levi’s 505s with an orange tab from the 1980s. 505s have a longer rise than 501s, and the jeans fit close to APC New Standards or new 501s: decently tapered, fitted but not slim. Orange Tab was Levi’s budget line, but the quality on these are incredible since everything made 30 years ago was produced to high standards. They are post-selvedge and have a small E butt tag, two things that cause vintage buyers to skip them. That’s fine. Tags and rivets ultimately don’t make a jean look good, just cool.