Is this the world's oldest bag? 'T-Rex' leather clutch is about to go up for auction for eye-watering price

Vintage fashion may be having its moment, but just how far back in time are we willing to go for the perfect wardrobe addition?

Well, what's technically one of the 'world's oldest bags' is about to go up for auction in Paris, and it has some big prehistoric links.

The clutch bag made headlines back in April, after its creators, The Organoid Company, Lab-Grown Leather Limited and creative agency VML, claimed they'd successfully managed to craft it using 'T-Rex leather'.

The design was created by experimental fashion house, Enfin Leve, and is a textured peacock colour, with a sterling silver zip compartment across the middle and claw-style markings.

It also has a longer strap complete with hardware designed to emulate a DNA fragment up close.

AFP/Getty

"The Organoid Company reconstructed collagen sequences from 66-million-year-old T-Rex fossils and grew them into a material. The total yield fit on four A4 sheets", the fashion brand noted in an Instagram post, presenting the final product, adding, "It has a character unlike anything we've handled. Dense, primal, operating on its own logic."

The bag was reportedly brought to life using preserved blood proteins, allowing researches to understand what T-Rex collagen sequence would have looked like, incorporating it into lab-devised leather cells.

“This project demonstrates how genome and protein engineering can create entirely new classes of biomaterials", says Thomas Mitchell, CEO of The Organoid Company.

AFP/Getty

"By reconstructing and optimizing ancient protein sequences, we’ve designed T-Rex leather inspired by prehistoric biology and cloned it into a custom-engineered cell line. It’s a bold example of synthetic biology extending beyond medicine into sustainable material innovation.”

However, this is still very much up for debate between scientists, some of whom claim the equal presence of chicken protein in its creation means it doesn't necessarily qualify as a dinosaur.

After spending the last couple of months on display in Amsterdam, the bag will now go up for auction at Hôtel Drouot in Paris on 11 June, and is expected to fetch an eye-watering €300,000–500,000, described as "one of the most singular lots ever offered at auction."

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