Desk Report
The world’s oldest pair of jeans, according to auction officials, maybe a pair of men’s work pants that sold for $114,000 (£92,010). In 1857, a shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina yielded the white pants, which were discovered inside a submerged trunk. They have a five-button fly, and it’s thought that a miner formerly owned them.
According to Holabird Western Americana Collections, the jeans were one of 270 pieces of Gold Rush-era memorabilia that sold for a combined price of about $1 million.
On December 3, the auction was held both online and in Reno, Nevada in the western United States. The managing partner of the company that possessed the artefacts, California Gold Marketing Group, Dwight Manley, remarked, “Those miner’s trousers are like the first flag on the moon, a significant moment in history.” “There are no five-button fly jeans from prior times.”
Items from the SS Central America, popularly known as the “ship of gold,” a 280-foot (85-meter) steamer that transported people to and from Central America to the US east coast in the 1850s, were used in the exhibit. In September 1857, the ship sank after a Category 2 hurricane, killing 425 of the 578 passengers and crew. With an estimated 21 tonnes of gold, passengers submerged. An estimated 21 tonnes of gold coins and artefacts were carried on board by passengers. 1988 saw the initial discovery of the shipwreck.
The men’s labor pants were found in a trunk that belonged to John Dement, an Oregonian who may have bought them in San Francisco, according to the auction house. According to auction authorities, the jeans’ five-button fly strongly suggests they may be an early version of the work pants Levi Strauss offered.
According to auction officials, the fly is “virtually comparable, if not literally identical, to Levis of today, including the precise form, shape, and size of the buttons themselves.”
16 years after the shipwreck that yielded the miner’s pants, in 1873, Levi Strauss created the first pair of blue jeans in San Francisco. Although they weren’t “miner’s work pants,” the company’s historian and archive director Tracey Panek told the BBC there is “no relationship between Levi Strauss & Co and the Reno auction pants.”
She asserted that the pants were created years before Levi Strauss obtained the patent for its blue jeans and that button-fly pants were typical in the 19th century. The transaction takes place two months after an auction in New Mexico sold a pair of antique Levi’s pants from the 1880s that had been discovered in an abandoned mineshaft in the western US for $76,000.
A variety of items were offered at the SS Central America shipwreck auction, including passenger receipts, clothing from the middle of the nineteenth century, a brass bell that sold for $18,000, a clear glass ashtray that went for $1,500, and cutlery and kitchen utensils like a double-spouted pitcher and warped cutlery. The shipwreck’s remaining contents will be auctioned off in February 2023.
