Someone just bought a fedora for more than half a million dollars.
But as the sky-high price suggests, this is no ordinary hat. Indeed, it’s the very one that sat atop the head of Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones movies.
The famous fedora fetched a bank-account busting 393,600 British pounds (around $520,000) at the latest Prop Store auction in London on Thursday. The price includes the 23 percent buyer’s premium that’s paid to the auctioneer, with the actual bid topping out at 320,000 pounds (around $425,000).
Information about the buyer is yet to be disclosed, though it’s possible he or she may wish to remain anonymous. We can say this, though: They must be a huge fan of Harrison Ford. Or really like fedoras. Probably both.
Prop Store’s website describes the hat as a “globally recognized cinematic treasure [that was] worn extensively by Harrison Ford” during the 1981 blockbuster Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first in the franchise.
Containing Ford’s signature on an inner band and made of rabbit felt, the fedora is the work of costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis, who collaborated with Indiana Jones director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas to help complete the look of the swashbuckling archaeology professor.
While it was delivered to the production team as new, the designer said to give it its worn look they had to sit on it a lot, wring it repeatedly, and treat it with bleach and dust.
Prop Store says that identifying marks on the auctioned fedora show that it was used in “numerous shots and sequences throughout the film, including several filmed at Elstree Studios, such as the Raven Bar sequence, the Well of Souls sequence, and the Bantu Wind cabin sequence.”
Ford also wore it “during such memorable moments as coming face to face with the king cobra in the Well of Souls, shooting the swordsman in Cairo, fighting the German mechanic under the flying wing, and being dragged behind the truck during the truck chase.”
Han Solo’s jacket
The biggest surprise of Thursday’s auction, however, was the failure of Han Solo’s jacket — the event’s headline lot — to reach its reserve price. Worn by Harrison Ford in Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back, the blue-gray jacket was expected to go under the hammer for as much as 1 million British pounds (around $1.3 million), but, with the auction halted at 450,000 pounds, it didn’t even reach its 500,000 pounds reserve.
A full-size, working replica of the DeLorean car from Back to the Future, which was expected to fetch between 80,000 and 100,000 pounds (around $105,125 and $130,000), also went unsold.
The London- and Los Angeles-based Prop Store has held a movie memorabilia auction annually for the last four years, and this time put more than 600 pieces of memorabilia from around 150 movies and television shows up for sale.
Harrison Ford is gearing up to make his final appearance as Indiana Jones in a movie slated for release in 2021. Presumably, he’ll need a new hat for that.
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