The Most Expensive Jackets Ever Sold — Ranked by Verified Hammer Price

The most expensive jacket ever sold at public auction isn’t made of diamonds or crocodile skin. It’s a beta-cloth coverall manufactured by B. Welson Co. in 1968, and it accompanied Buzz Aldrin on the most consequential journey in human history — the first crewed lunar landing mission, Apollo 11.

What makes this jacket extraordinary isn’t the material. It’s the fact that it’s the only garment from the first lunar landing ever offered for private ownership. Aldrin wore it throughout the translunar injection phase — the burn that committed the crew to leaving Earth’s orbit forever. His name is embroidered above the mission emblem. You can see 52 years of care in the stitching.

Sotheby’s confirmed this surpassed the previous American space-flown auction record: an Apollo 11 lunar dust bag that sold for $1.8 million in 2017. [1]

The black and red calf-leather jacket with the winged shoulders — you know this jacket. Everyone knows this jacket. It was worn by Michael Jackson in the 1983 “Thriller” video, which remains the only music video inducted into the National Film Registry and cost $1 million to make at a time when that was genuinely unthinkable for a music video.

Gold trader Milton Verret of Austin, Texas, bought it at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills and announced plans to use it for children’s charity fundraising. It’s one of two jackets used in the zombie dance sequence — the other one never left the Jackson estate. [2]

Guinness World Records officially recognized this as the most valuable pop-culture garment ever sold. That record stood unchallenged until the 2022 space memorabilia wave.

Golf’s green jacket is one of the most recognizable symbols in sport — winners don’t even get to keep them. But Horton Smith’s jacket is different. He won the Masters Tournament in 1934 and 1936, back when the ceremony was informal enough that the jacket actually left Augusta. It’s the earliest surviving Masters green jacket in existence. [3]

A journalist discovered it in 1994, seemingly forgotten. By 2013, it sold for over $682,000 — the highest price ever paid for a golf garment. Some records take 80 years to establish their full weight.

The worn and signed Bad World Tour jacket sold in 2026 for nearly 3x its $80,000–$100,000 estimate. The timing is not a coincidence. The 2026 release of the Jackson biopic Michael — starring Jaafar Jackson and projecting a $65–90 million opening weekend — drove renewed interest from collectors who’d never seen the original tour. [4]

Julien’s Auctions has noted this pattern before: every major cultural revival that reintroduces a legacy artist to new generations expands the collector pool for authenticated physical objects. The biopic effect on celebrity memorabilia prices is real and measurable.

This one surprised even seasoned collectors. A Levi’s S506XXE jacket from World War II, preserved in unworn condition for over 80 years, sold in April 2026 for 55 million Japanese yen — roughly $307,588 — setting the Guinness World Record for the most expensive second-hand denim jacket ever sold. [5]

What makes the S506XXE rare is specific to wartime manufacturing: Levi’s removed the watch pocket and replaced standard buttons with laurel-leaf versions to conserve metal for the war effort. These are exactly the kind of production-era details that serious collectors treat as provenance. The jacket was never worn. In 80+ years of existence, it never touched a torso. That matters enormously to the denim auction market.

Japan’s vintage denim collector community is arguably the most sophisticated in the world — serious buyers there have tracked production variations in 1930s–50s American workwear for decades. The $307K result reflects that depth of knowledge.

Designed by entrepreneur Farrah Gray in collaboration with diamond specialist Peter Marco, the Diamond Bomber features 460 carats of flawless diamonds embedded across the exterior and reportedly took 14 months to complete. The $10 million figure is the stated price — there is no public sale data, no auction house receipt, no third-party appraisal published in the open record. [6]

It’s marketed as unreproducible, which is probably accurate. Whether it would fetch $10M at a transparent public auction is an entirely different question.

A collaboration between Liverpool designer Karl Mathers (Lord Swagger) and luxury goods creator Stuart Hughes, the Infinity jacket features 2.1 kg of 24-carat solid gold, 129 carats of flawless diamonds, and platinum details. It was commissioned by an anonymous musician and took three months to complete. [7]

I rate this Probable rather than speculative because the materials cost alone — gold at current spot prices plus the diamond grade cited — places the floor near the stated figure. The labor and exclusivity premium on top are reasonable. This is closer to a market-rate valuation than the Diamond Bomber’s number, which depends more heavily on brand markup.