Work trousers recovered from a trunk from an 1857 shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina are described by auctioneers as the world’s oldest known jeans which sold for $114,000.
The heavy-duty five-button miner’s white trousers were among 270 Gold Rush-era artifacts that sold for nearly $1 million in Reno last weekend, according to antiques store Holabird Western Americana Collections, reports a local Arabic daily.
According to Russia Today, there is a dispute over whether these expensive pants have any links with the creator of modern blue jeans, Levi Strauss, as it predates by about 16 years the first trousers officially manufactured by the company Levi Strauss & co; San Francisco in 1873.
Some say the historical evidence points to connections to Strauss, who was a wholesaler of dry goods at the time, and that the pants could be a very early version of what would later become the famous jeans.
But company historian and archive director Tracy Pannick says any claims about its origin are “speculation”.
Whatever their origin, there is no denying that the pants were made before the SS Central America sank in a hurricane on September 12, 1857.
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