Living a few blocks from a clothing store filled with cute jeans and vintage finds may seem like a great thing to some people, but for me, it’s an issue. If the fit is right, I simply can’t hold back from buying a pair of vintage jeans. Between the high quality and reasonable cost, how could a self-proclaimed vintage denim addict like me resist?
It was a warm Sunday morning in October. I walked into The Workshop Boutique at the USC Village and headed straight toward the back of the store to its vintage jeans section. I had to see what was on the rack that day. There on a hanger, all but calling out to me: a pair of light wash vintage 501 Levis. Vintage Levi 501s are known for their flattering fit, straight leg cut, and mid-rise style. This is the classic jean that millions of people across 70 years have come to love.
The 501s I came across in The Workshop that day are now my favorite jeans. They’re the staple piece in my closet. But until now, it never occurred to me to ask: Why do I and many others value vintage jeans over jeans that are made today? What is it about vintage jeans that make them so valuable? Where did my jeans come from? How many times did these jeans play a role as a staple piece in someone else’s life?
According to ThredUp, the largest online consignment and thrift store, “consumers are prioritizing value and accelerating their shift to thrift.” Younger generations have recognized the environmental impact the fashion industry has on the planet and want to be part of the change to a more sustainable future.
These two changes could be an explanation as to why some fashion consumers have shifted their interest in vintage flea markets and secondhand clothing as of recently. Rachel Gagliarity of Bratty Official Vintage in Los Angeles says for many people, it’s worth it to spend more money on a high quality piece of clothing once, rather than having to keep buying new pieces of cheap clothing more frequently. She goes on saying the vintage items that are sold are often made at least 60-70 years ago, so if they have lasted this long, the customer has no reason to believe they wouldn’t last another 60.
I realized vintage jeans are a good contender for sustainable practice because of their high quality. Since the quality is so good, the jeans get sold over and over again avoiding adding waste into landfills. But why is the quality so good? I had to know.
I wanted to retrace the life of my vintage 501 Levis. I wanted to connect them to the era in which they were created, and the lives they had lived in between that moment they left the Levis factory until now. By doing so, I hoped to understand where these jeans were made, what went into making them, information about the year they were made and how the combination of all those things contributes to their fit and design.
I called the store’s manager, Monique Reynolds, also known as “Mo,” a petite, 30-something year old woman with a big smile, usually dressed in a cute outfit matching a mannequin in the store’s window.
“Hello?” I said nervously as she picked up the phone. “Is this Mo?”
I told her that I am trying to find out the history behind the jeans I bought from her.
Before she hung my jeans on the rack at The Workshop in the USC Village, Mo told me, they were in an LA warehouse, run by a vintage denim seller.
I met him at the Long Beach Flea Market,” Mo told me. “I told him I had a store so he gave me his number and let me come to his warehouse to come sift through his stuff. That’s where I got yours from.”
She explained to me this warehouse was filled with denim jeans, jackets, shorts, overalls and other vintage clothing.
The clothing reselling market is a multi-billion dollar industry. According to First Research, which compiles data on the fashion industry’s profits, the used merchandise stores industry in the U.S includes about 20,000 stores with a combined annual revenue of about $17.6 billion. This revenue includes vintage jeans—that is, jeans dating from the 1960s to the ’90s.
Although it’s hard to pinpoint which sales come from vintage jeans and vintage denim, after talking to multiple vintage denim sellers, it seems that each seller can sell large amounts of jeans each year, ranging from about 100 to 500 pairs annually depending on the seller. With thousands of pairs of vintage jeans circulating in the marketplace, the lifespan of a pair of vintage Levi jeans made in the 1960s could have been sold 30 times over the decades, said Mo.
I thought about my pair. If these jeans were made in the 1960s, my mom could have worn them and been in at least 10 people’s closets before me. I imagined all the places they could have been.
Maybe a young woman in Texas, living on a ranch tending to her farm. Perhaps even an artist in New York City, building ceramic sculptures in her studio. These jeans have been part of a life before me and I wanted to know.
Before talking to the warehouse owner where Mo bought my jeans, I decided to do some of my own investigating.
First I sought out Jackson Langley at the Silverlake Flea Market. He told me wholesalers often overcharge on vintage items, knowing that with high demand, they can get away with it. “I think selling is great because it’s sustainable since it’s secondhand and that’s helping the environment. But yeah, some of the prices really get out of hand.”
Depending on the seller, some vintage jeans go for $200 and others, like my favorite pair from The Workshop were $70.
Langley hinted that if they were from the 1970s or earlier, they probably would be going for a higher price since much of their value is in how they’ve sustained their quality throughout the years.
Between Langley and online selling sites, I’ve noticed that if my jeans were from the 1970s they would cost more since their market value is around $200.
This put their value in perspective for me. If a pair of vintage Levis were sold at $200 20 times, they would generate $4,000 in their life.
Wow. I take a look at my jeans. These jeans hold so much value. And the value only keeps growing as the years go on and they stay intact.
This is similar to the value of certain sneakers, like the Jordan 1 Retro High Off-White Chicago sneaker, being sold for around $200 and then reselling on reselling websites for over $4,000.
The value of these items that exist in the resale market just keeps generating profit with each sale.
But why such value in my pair of jeans? Well, for one thing, said Langley as he examined my jeans, true high-quality vintage Levis were made in the USA.
He notices a leather patch on the back of them with the words, “Made in the U.S.A” written on the patch in red ink.
Langley tells me vintage Made in the U.S.A Levis are made out of 100% cotton, slowly becoming softer as the cotton fibers break down as they are worn. Today, many pairs of Levis are made in countries such as Japan, China, and Italy and can’t replicate that same high quality. The jeans made today aim to be just as comfortable as vintage pairs, but with 60 years of strides creating the softness, this comfortable denim can’t be recreated today unless fibers called Rayon or Elastane are added, making the quality of these jeans not as great.
Gagliarity, vintage seller and owner of Bratty Official Vintage who cycles through about 100 pairs of vintage jeans a year by buying and selling from the Rose Bowl flea market and her online website, explained to me that my golden pair of Levis were definitely worn in to make them as soft as they are. “That’s the best, when it’s a buttery soft denim.”
When she says buttery soft denim, I instantly know the feeling she’s describing.
My jeans are so soft that I wear them on a plane ride. This buttery soft denim melts you into your seat. It’s hard to come across a pair of jeans so comfortable.
I pull out a pair of non-vintage jeans from my closet and compare the texture of them to my Levis. I’ve worn my non-vintage jeans for the past three years but as I’ve worn them, they haven’t softened.
But with my Levis, they’ve gotten noticeably more pliant even in just one year. I can’t even wear them more than three or four times in between washes because they stretch out so much as I wear them.
By comparing my vintage jeans to ones that were made in the past few years, and talking to Gagliarity and Langley, I’ve come to the conclusion that they had to have been made before the 2000s. These jeans have definitely been worn many, many times.
But I still had questions.
If they have been worn so many times to be this soft, can I figure out when exactly they were sent out of the Levis factory? Were they always in California? What do the tags and stitches mean? I’ve seen that some of my jeans have a red tab, some are orange and some are silver, but what does the color difference represent?
My jeans, the pair I bought at The Workshop, have a red tab, and I wanted to find out what that could mean. Are they from the ’70s? The ’90s?
I tried looking online to see what my red tag signified. I just got more confused. One site said red tabs don’t necessarily mean a pair of jeans is vintage because Levis still makes jeans with red tabs. And then there were numerous citations about orange tabs, which referred to “unusual silhouettes.” Vintage sellers might understand that, but I had no idea.
I was completely confused!
With multiple unverified sources giving me different answers, I knew I needed to talk to someone who might know how to retrace them. And who better than the man with the warehouse who sold my vintage jeans to Mo at The Workshop.
Mo told me I could find him at the Long Beach Antique and Flea Market.
”His name is Freddy,” Mo told me. “He’s a really tall Hispanic guy. His booth is by the spot by the beer.”
So I headed to the Long Beach Antique and Flea Market to get some answers.
I sorted through my jeans in my closet, yanked my light wash 501s, threw them into a mint green shopping bag, and headed to the Long Beach Antique and Flea Market to get some answers.
As I waited in line to get inside, I watched the people around me and took notice of what they were wearing. I saw so many pairs of Levis as shorts, as pants, as jackets and in so many different cuts, styles and colors. The pair in my right hand was only one pair out of millions of Levis produced in the world. Each having their own story of their own. Who knows? Maybe the pair on the woman with the long wavy hair in front of me was one time living in the same closet as the ones in my bag.
I remembered Mo mentioning Freddy’s set up at the flea market had racks of denim, t-shirts and vintage military clothes. I chose a random aisle and kept my eye out.
I turned down the first aisle to my left and saw a rack of Army jackets in the distance. As I approached the tent, I noticed a man sitting in the middle of all the clothes, creating a throne for himself in a foldable lawn chair as potential buyers approached him. I stepped up to his tent, greeting him with a casual, “Hello. How are you, Freddy?”
He looked up and said, “Yes, I am,” but his expression said, “Who wants to know?” I told him that I’m trying to retrace where my Levis came from and that Mo from The Workshop Boutique told me this is where I could find him.
“These are my favorite pair of jeans,” I said. “I’m trying to find out where they came from and when they were made. I want to know the different possibilities of where these jeans might have been living before they were mine.”
The longer I talked, the more I could tell he couldn’t care less where my jeans came from. He looked bored. He sat in his chair looking up at me, but I saw his eyes wandering past my shoulder at potential customers. He had no interest in entertaining the possibilities of the history of my jeans.
“No one is going to tell you where they get their jeans,” Freddy told me, shaking his head at my naivete.
Behind him sat a parked white van with the backdoor open. Inside, stacks of denim and other vintage clothing laid on top of one another, creating a mound so large I wondered how he chooses what to put on the hangers when selling at the flea market.
Undaunted by his indifference, I whipped out my Levi 501s and showed them to him. They had a few holes in the butt and the wash was slowly fading. He gave them a look and just nodded his head. “Those are made in America. I sell so many pairs of jeans,” he pointed to the racks. “There is no way for me to be able to tell you where I got those. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. Just look up the numbers tag.”
The numbers tag? I asked Freddy what he meant. But he was already starting to talk to someone wanting to buy a pair of shorts.
I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t want to talk more.
What is the secrecy around vintage clothes? Why does it feel as if these vintage sellers are like drug dealers, buying their denim for $15 from a warehouse or thrift store, but then selling it for $100? Or how they keep where they got their stock of denim a secret, not wanting anyone else to get a hold of those items?
I said thank you and turned around, deciding to leave Freddy’s tent with few answers. I headed to the exit to find out the origins of my jeans from someone who would be more willing to give me the answers I craved.
It was a Thursday morning and I began complaining to my friend Lyric about my discouraging interaction with Freddy. She told me about a man she had met in DTLA earlier in the week who owned a vintage denim store in the building we worked in, only one floor above us at Niche Garment Co.
This is when I met Saku.
Saku runs his own vintage denim business in a suite on the corner of a building, facing out to Downtown LA.
He was dressed in dark wash vintage Levis himself and welcomed me into his studio as I surrounded myself with racks of beautifully organized and pressed vintage denim.
I pulled out my light wash 501s, still in the same green bag from my interaction with Freddy. I handed them over to Saku, nervous he won’t know the answers I’ve been hunting for.
Saku glanced at them, flipped them around, inspected every inch, and quickly came to the conclusion that my pair were 90s Levis.
He looked at the inside leg of the pants and says, “These aren’t selvedge denim so they were made after the 1980s.”
Selvedge denim, Saku explains while showing me a pair of older vintage Levis in his studio, are tightly finished edges commonly used in ’70s and ’80s denim. My jeans didn’t have that.
“Wow, and they’re made in the USA. That’s really cool,” Saku said as he looked at the leather tag on the back seeing “Made in U.S.A” in fading red letters. He examined the rest of my jeans, noticing the rivets as sometimes that can help date them.
He pulled them inside out and saw the back of the inside tag has “501-0193” written on it. “This may be a date saying they were made in January of 1993,” said Saku. He was not sure if that’s what it means, but he thought it was a solid guess as he already thought they were ’90s Levis.
This made sense since as Freddy told me to look at the tag. Saku had just given the tag meaning.
I told him about my interaction with Freddy and he didn’t seem surprised. He told me it’s common for sellers to want to keep the source of their inventory private as it’s how they make their living. The worth of a piece isn’t about where it’s from—whether it be a Goodwill or another vintage seller—but rather, an experienced seller knowing the genuine value of the vintage item. It’s about knowledge.
Freddy’s reaction to my questions, Saku said, just showed how he wanted to protect where he gets his denim, wanting to stay on top of competition.
So, thanks to the help of Mo, Gagliarity, Langley, and Saku (OK, Freddy too) and the internet, I’ve gathered that these jeans were most likely made somewhere in the US in the 1990s. They started in a factory most likely in a southern state, according to Saku. He told me that’s where Levis began manufacturing their jeans back in the day. That’s when I started imagining my pair of 501s in a store in the South being bought by a young woman, ready to be the first person to break down those cotton fibers turning them into the buttery smooth jeans they are today.
Maybe she wore them her whole life, and I was the next to have them. Maybe they lived on the racks of multiple vintage markets, hopping from closet to dresser every few years generating thousands of dollars.
I can only imagine the possibilities of this pair of jeans—how many lives it lived, through how many hands it passed. The worth only goes up as they get older, and the quality stays the same or gets even softer.
When I climbed back into my car after meeting Saku, I kept my green bag with the jeans close to me.
I parked my car and headed upstairs to put them back in my closet, stacked in the center of my closet, piled on top of eight other pairs of jeans I had sitting there.
But before putting them away, I took a good look at them, wondering where they’ll go next once I’m done with them. They could end up on a different continent, at a thrift store in Tokyo, or they could even end up back on a rack at The Workshop. Or, maybe, I’ll keep them. Just in case I have a daughter who’ll want to wear them when she’s 22.
But, who knows? Someone could be retracing this pair of jeans back to me one day.