I spend a lot of time digging up auctions for our eBay Roundup and Inside Track posts. Sometimes, when I want to take a break from looking up stuff on eBay I … look up stuff on eBay. Lately, I’ve been really fascinated by vintage military and biker gear. To be sure, really beautiful Italian suits and modern streetwear labels are nice (and often what we list in our roundups), but for the purposes of just browsing, they rarely capture my imagination like these vintage pieces.
Such items are easy to find in retrospect. All you have to do is search for a term, click the “Completed listings” checkbox on the left side of eBay’s page, and then sort by “Price + Shipping: highest first” (that’s in the drop down menu on the right side of eBay’s site). That’ll give you the highest priced auctions that just ended, which usually yields some crazy stuff that collectors recently fought over.
For example, take leather A-2s. The A-2 is a military jacket worn by US pilots in World War II. They’re distinguished by a fold down collar, zippered front, and two flapped pockets. Ever since there’s been a vintage clothing collectors scene, there have been A-2 fanatics. The really awesome pieces tend to have sewn-on patches on the front and hand painted art at the back. Jesse put up a link to a Collectors Weekly article a while ago, and it has some interesting history about how these paintings got onto the backs of our servicemen.
Anyway, do a competed listing search for “leather A-2” (without the quotation marks) and sort by price highest ended. You’ll get really incredible looking things such as this leather jacket with a painted demon’s head and this one that says “Flying Jenny.” Other cool terms to search for? I like “motorcycle club,” “car club,” “engineer boots,” “Champion shirt,” and “Buco,” just to name a few. Make sure you’re looking in the “Clothing, Shoes, and Accessories” section, however, lest you want to wade through a lot of non-menswear related results.
Wearekolas also aggregates some of these finds, although they don’t update their blog too often. The above pictures are from them. This jacket in particular is a doozy, although it has that damaged shoulder line I talked about last week.
