Three years ago, in a mineshaft 250 feet below a sunny Arizona day, two guys struck gold.
Actually, better than gold: they struck denim.
Buried under a century of rocks and rubble, they found seven pairs of nineteenth-century
jeans that are collectively worth way more than their weight in gold—at least three
hundred thousand dollars.
That’s because crusty old jeans, even scraps of them, are in unbelievably short supply
and unbelievably high demand.
And if you were conscious for even thirty seconds of an econ class, you know what that
means…
people acting nuts.
But why all the demand?
It’s not like jeans are hard to come by nowadays—at least a billion pairs are produced
a year, and you can get these war crimes for under 25 dollars.
The market’s persistent thirst for vintage denim has its roots in the decidedly working-class,
sometimes rebellious, extremely American history of blue jeans.
See, in 1873, when Levi’s first patented the riveted, indigo-dyed, cotton twill pants
we know and love today, they were workwear.
And to be clear, that’s workwear as in “wear them while you work in the mines,” not “wear
them while you work on a video about pants for people who mostly aren’t wearing any.”
And clothes for miners and factory workers have to be durable and functional: which for
early jeans meant large pockets in convenient places, a high stitch count to prevent rips,
and copper rivets reinforcing the parts of the garment most prone to tearing.
But it only took a few decades for jeans to become an everyday thing—and an American
icon.
In the thirties and forties, cowboy movies made jeans the patron pant of cool guys on
horses; during World War II, Americans wore them to work in the military-industrial complex
at home and abroad; postwar, teens took them up to be rebels, and soon enough, blue jeans
were as American as apple pie.
And as American cultural influence spread in the mid-twentieth century, everyone wanted
a slice of that pie: In Japan, importing jeans was illegal until the late fifties, so a huge
black market for secondhand jeans sprung up in Ueno, Tokyo.
In the sixties, Levi’s sales were banned in East Germany, but when their economy was
in the toilet in the late seventies, the East German government requested Levi’s send
them eight hundred thousand pairs to sell to the cool-American-pants-wanting masses.
But most Americans didn’t know how much money their jeans could fetch overseas, so
instead of getting into the resale market, they wore them to shreds or cut them up to
use as packing material.
Demand abroad outpaced demand in the US by so much that Japanese sellers would actually
buy those packing scraps, stitch them back together into jeans, and sell them.
All this is to say, vintage jeans have long since been both an American icon and a good
product, so the demand isn’t a total surprise.
But in their 150-year history, a truly impressive parade of forces have kept supply low: from
the Levi’s patent stopping anyone else from making riveted pants until 1892, to a warehouse
fire in 1906 that destroyed a ton of Levi’s inventory, to post-Depression Americans clinging
to their jeans instead of selling or replacing, to import restrictions postwar, to labor strikes
in garment factories in the seventies.
So now, if you want one of those iconic pairs of yesteryear jeans instead of these horror
shows, you’ve gotta know how to look for ‘em.
Luckily, it’s not hard for the layman to date a pair of Levi’s.
You just need to take them out to a nice dinner, engage with their interests, be communica—nope.
Stupid joke.
Not reading the rest of that.
Here’s how you figure out how old a pair of Levi’s are.
There are a few features that tip you off to a really old pair: Early Levi’s, produced
around the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act, had a racist little label on the inside pocket
that said “The only kind made by white labor,” which is definitely not cool but definitely
does tell you the pants are old—the company stopped printing that sometime in the 1890s.
Other signs aren’t as racist: for example, the company didn’t start using belt loops
until 1922, so a buckle back pair is likely older than that.
In 1937, they started covering up rivets on the back to stop them from scratching up seats.
From 1936 to 1970, the brand name on the little red tag in the back had a capital “E.”
Before 1967, Levi’s printed washing information on the inside pocket, but after that, they
started putting it on separate care labels.
So if there’s a care label at all, your jeans are from after 1967.
If that care label has the Levi’s logo on it in red or black, it’s from at least the
mid-eighties.
If that care label is huge and looks like a little booklet, it’s probably from after
2003.
And on most of these tags, in the jumble of numbers, you can find the actual time and
place the pants were made: this is the factory code, which is also on the back of the fly
button.
On this pair of pants it’s 513, one of a few that mean “made in the USA.”
This is the style of pants—550s—this is some more info about the denim, and this is
the month and year they were made, in this case, January, 1997.
So by the common definition of vintage—items that are at least twenty years old—these
are vintage.
But they’re not the most valuable: they don’t use the selvedge denim of the old
days, nor are they from particularly early in jeans history.
If you want to find a really valuable pair of jeans, the kind that fetch five or more
figures at auction, you need to look a little harder than my writer did.
That’s what so-called “denim archaeologists” do: buying jean jackets off of passerby’s
backs, sifting through attics and trunks in abandoned houses, and, yes, rappelling down
into hundred-year-old mine shafts hoping to find jeans left behind in 1888.
And if you’re typing out a comment where you refer to these denim archaeologists as
“Indiana Jeans,” I’m sorry to inform you they’ve already thought of that… but
go ahead and post it anyway, it’s still funny.
Denim archaeology is a musty, dusty, risky business—there’s a reason your parents
taught you not to play in abandoned silver mines.
But a good find can net tens of thousands of dollars, like the “mine-found” pair
that—despite some noisy skeptics claiming they’re not actually from the 1880s—still
sold at auction for over 87 thousand dollars [and are currently only available for viewing
by appointment in Los Angeles, an appointment my outside correspondent Amy obviously got.]
So moral of the story: go play in those mines!
Thar be gold down there!
Or just, I dunno, thrift some jeans.
I’m not the boss of you.
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