Vintage Levi’s Jeans Gets the Haute Couture Treatment
A covetable pair of vintage jeans made it all the way to Haute Couture Week.
The vintage Levi’s 501 XX Big E jeans served as the canvas for gilded embroidery in Valentino Haute Couture’s collection.
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Known as the “Big E” for bearing a red tab with a capitalized “E,” the tab denotes jeans produced before 1971. It also means the rare, collector-worthy jeans were manufactured in the United States before Levi’s moved production overseas in 2002.
The jeans were styled with chandelier earrings, a simple cutout top, a blue bouclé coat and flat slides adorned with gold bows.
Valentino’s quiet luxury look was part of the Italian fashion house’s Fall/Winter 2023-2024 collection titled “Un Château” staged at the Château de Chantilly. Valentino creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli set out to challenge the “perceived complexity of Haute Couture” by highlighting “pure simplicity” and designs that “reflect contemporary sensibilities,” according to the show notes.
Designers are normalizing denim in haute couture collections. Balenciaga included blue and gray jeans and a jacket in its F/W 23-24 collection and the fabric is a staple of RDVK Ronald van der Kemp’s couture collections. The designer showed denim patchwork coat dresses and coated jeans.
The vintage Levi’s were not the only jeans to grace the Valentino runway. Model Kaia Gerber opened the show wearing a white button-down shirt and trompe-l’œil jeans. Thousands of tiny beads in various shades of blue mimicked the appearance of worn-in jeans. The show notes said the “painstaking” beadwork is intended to excite curiosity and demands closer inspection to fully comprehend.
Valentino and Levi’s are a winning combination. In 2021, Piccioli tapped Levi’s to make 517 units of Levi’s Valentino Vintage 517 jeans and 5,107 units of a re-edition of the 517. The unisex jeans were finished with co-branded patches and interiors. The re-issued jeans retailed for $990.
