THE Realest Pair of Jeans

VINTAGE DENIM has gone from fringe specialty to the domain of digital natives everywhere. In a hype-fueled market, how much you can get for your Levi's depends on how good a story you're telling.

- JUSTINE HARMAN

WHEN LARRY MCKAUGHAN was coming up in the ’80s, the golden rules of denim were simple: Work hard. Don’t poach customers. Don’t rip people off— not too badly, anyway. And never reveal your sources. “It was a little bit rough-and-tumble. A fistfight was not uncommon,” says 68-year-old McKaughan, who is known as the King of Vintage and sells mid-century and earlier pieces from his collection, Heller’s Café. Originally, McKaughan was drawn to the grit, the grind, and the reverence for a bygone American era. “My father was a machinist. He used to come home and sweat metal,” he says. “Clothing had to represent the values. It had to be durable. It had to be strong. It had to last.”

Back then, denim dealing was a closed network of history-obsessed scroungers and deep-pocketed collectors in Japan. The story goes like this: Post–World War II, occupying U.S. soldiers began upselling their blue jeans abroad. One collector estimated that more than 70 percent of vintage American denim, including Levi’s, is currently owned by private Japanese collectors, a statistic that is included in an official brand press release from 2016. “The first guy who told me about vintage denim swore me to secrecy,” McKaughan says. “There were so few people in the United States at that time that knew about vintage denim.”