A dusty, old pair of Levi’s jeans sold at an auction this month for $76,000. The pants date to the 1880s and were discovered in an abandoned mine years ago. Printed on one of the pockets is a tagline that reads, “The only kind made by white labor.” That denim represents a lot of history about California and immigrant labor in the U.S., according to Wall Street Journal fashion columnist Jacob Gallagher.
The label emerged after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the U.S.
“Levi's around that time was manufacturing its jeans in the San Francisco area. Levi's is a company that was started in San Francisco. It sold a lot of jeans to miners in the West. But its production was done in that region where there were a lot of Chinese immigrants coming into the country at that point. So Levi's adopts the slogan. The label was placed on its products, jeans, and it was in advertisements as well.”
Gallagher points out that consumers must have wanted products made by white people, due in part to the anti-Chinese discrimination of the era.
He adds that the discriminatory history of Levi’s is widely unknown because many of these jeans became lost over the years.
“A lot of vintage guys I spoke with were like, ‘This is only the third or fourth time I've seen a pair of jeans like this.’ So for them to be intact and to have this label, they really are a piece of American history,” he says. “It does say something, frankly, about America more broadly, that this was a label that someone would have put on their products, and it would have been frankly a selling point.”
The jeans were bought by two vintage denim dealers, and they want a museum to purchase them.
“They do look like a pair of distressed jeans that you might find in a store today. They're remarkably intact. But they do have these nice imperfections that denim fans look for. They've got some holes in them. They've got some really nice fading, which is something that denim collectors will always look for. And that candle wax is also something that's really unique because around that time, miners were still using candles.”