The world’s “oldest” known pair of jeans in the world has been sold for whooping 114, 000 US dollars(94 lakhs), according to the AP report.
It said the jeans was pulled from a sunken trunk at an 1857 shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina.
The work pants as per the auction officials are the oldest known pair of jeans in the world .
The report said the pair of jeans is a white, heavy-duty miner’s pants with a five-button fly were among 270 Gold Rush-era artifacts that sold for a total of nearly $1 million in Reno last weekend, according to Holabird Western American Collections.
However, it mentioned that there’s disagreement about whether the pricey pants have any ties to the father of modern-day blue jeans, Levi Strauss, as they predate by 16 years the first pair officially manufactured by his San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co. in 1873.
“Some say historical evidence suggests there are links to Strauss, who was a wealthy wholesaler of dry goods at the time, and the pants could be a very early version of what would become the iconic jeans”, it stated.
But the company’s historian and archive director, Tracey Panek, says any claims about their origin are “speculation", the report said.
Regardless of their origin, there’s no denying the pants were made before the S.S. Central America sank in a hurricane on Sept. 12, 1857, packed with passengers who began their journey in San Francisco and were on their way to New York via Panama, it mentioned.
It added: there’s no indication older work pants dating to the Gold Rush-era exist.
