Read Justine’s odyssey on a far (far) flung, pair of $87,000 jeans for New York:

“Listed as “1885–1892 One Pocket Levi’s” and “mine-found” in the official Durango Vintage Festivus auction catalogue, the jeans have only one back pocket, a style the brand abandoned after 1901, and a buckle-back waist instead of belt loops because belts weren’t yet widely used. An interior pocket bag bears the brand’s Chinese Exclusion Act–era slogan, “The only kind made from white labor.” There are tarnished copper rivets, deep whiskers of wear around the knees and pockets, and a color-matched patch whipstitched to one leg. Their entire front is covered in 150-year-old candle-wax spatter…Depending on whom you ask, they are either an investment or an invention. And in a self-policing industry chronicled only by its own, the line between the two is intractably, perhaps intentionally, blurred.”