Wool of Unknown Origin: Part 1
In a seemingly unremarkable home, in the seemingly unremarkable city of Portland, a seemingly unremarkable iPhone rang out with a seemingly unremarkable Fleet Foxes ringtone. The caller: a reseller who made a living on the online marketplace Grailed, reaching out with a seemingly unremarkable tip. The receiver: a collector of seemingly unremarkable vintage clothing, who, for the sake of anonymity, requested that we refer to him with the seemingly unremarkable pseudonym ‘Rodrigo.’
Rodrigo’s contact in the resale business had come into a collection of lightly worn flannels from the estate of a recently-deceased man—a few months earlier, Rodrigo had put them in contact with a Supreme collector/startup founder who had just declared bankruptcy, and they were able to acquire most of the collection at a steep discount. To repay the favor, the Graild reseller let Rodrigo look through the flannels before putting them up for sale. Rodrigo ended up buying about half of the 50-flannel collection, spending about $1700.
“I hung them up in one of my closets and mostly forgot about them,” Rodrigo said. “You have to remember that this was the first autumn where we had to consider the coronavirus. There were not a lot of places you could go, so I was going to a lot of cafes just to show off my vintage outfits. I’d go to the grocery store and walk around for an hour, then just buy, like, a box of shelf-stable chai latte, or some bean sprouts.”
According to Rodrigo, the flannel that “created such a fuss” didn’t even see the outside of his closet until the next autumn season, when he wore it to a local cafe. “I was sitting there drinking my cascara-clove flat white with nutmeg when all of a sudden this woman sits next to me and starts talking about her great-grandfather.”
He assumed, for reasons unclear, that she intended to hit on him because she had noticed his vintage Nike Dunk SB Low sneakers. He was surprised to find out that he was interested in neither him nor his shoes, but his flannel.
According to Rodrigo, the mysterious woman believed that the flannel he was wearing had been hand-woven by her great-grandpa Pendleton, the founder of his now-iconic namesake company.
As recorded by outerwear historians, a few years after he founded the company, Thomas L. Pendleton hand-wove a dozen flannel shirts that he considered his masterpieces. For decades, all succeeding flannels were based on these original models, nicknamed the ‘alpha series’ by collectors and enthusiasts.
After Pendleton’s death, the alpha series flannels left his private collection in a few different ways; one was stolen by a duplicitous grandson and sold to Woolrich, where it was unwoven for study and replication. Beach Boys founder and notorious flannel aficionado Brian Wilson supposedly bought one at an auction in the mid-70s, but he has avoided commenting on it his whole career.
“So basically,” Rodrigo sums up, “this woman shows up and tells me that I’m wearing one of her great grandfather’s long-lost flannels. I remember thinking ‘this is the weirdest way that anybody has ever tried to hook up with me.’”
Sometime later, something that should have been obvious finally occurred to Rodrigo: perhaps the woman wasn’t hitting on him. Perhaps there was something special about his flannel. He put it up for auction on Grailed at a starting price of two thousand dollars, which he assumed at the time to be a prohibitively exorbitant price.
“I just wanted to put it out there and see if anybody would reach out to me,” he said. “I had no intention of actually selling it, I was just trying to gather information.” To his surprise, he received a private message almost immediately. It was from a now-deleted Graild account ‘fantasticflannelfanatic5’ and it said, ominously “u have no idea what u have. u have no clue what u just set in motion.”
Rodrigo wanted to ignore the message, to write it off as some kind of joke, but he just couldn’t. A bidding war started on the flannel, and as Rodrigo watched the price climb. Four thousand. Five thousand. Six thousand.
When bids reached seven thousand, Rodrigo took the flannel off the market. “I didn’t know what I had,” he said, “but I definitely wasn’t gonna let it go until I found out what it was.”
Over the next few days, Rodrigo started doing more and more research on the alpha series flannels, and he became convinced that what he had was the real thing. Authenticated alpha series pieces could sell at prices far higher than the two thousand dollars he originally thought was ridiculous; one sold in 2013 for two million euros and another in 2016 for three million.
These numbers were swimming around Rodrigo’s head when he heard his Fleet Foxes ringtone peal out once again—although this time, nothing seemed unremarkable. The caller was a gruff woman with a thick Irish accent who didn’t introduce herself.
“She offered me half a million for the flannel, and I said no and hung up,” Rodrigo said. “I don’t even know where she got my number. Then the next day she calls me back, and I don’t remember what exactly she said, but she offered a full million. I say no again, and she starts going off, telling me that I’ll never sell it and that she’d get her hands on it one way or another.”
Little did Rodrigo know that he would be grappling with the consequences and implications of this call for the next two years.
Owning a controversial and potentially massively valuable vintage flannel is an unexpected assessment of a person’s values and worldview. In one moment, a simple article of clothing can conjure up images of dollar signs and press conferences—the mere insinuation that your flannel is genuine brings with it the feeling that you solved the puzzle. You were smart enough to spot the Real Thing in a sea of forgeries, and you’re about to get the credit that you deserve.
Conversely, as authenticity is challenged, so too is your identity, your very worth—the flannel becomes the target of resentment, seen as nothing but a worthless bundle of dyed and woven wool owned by someone stupid enough to think they knew what was what.
Wilhiem Hoffenheimer is no stranger to this phenomenon; he’s a vintage clothing investigator who makes a living proving and disproving the authenticity of various items. He’s watched his clients in the lowest moments of their lives and some of the best.
When Rodrigo reached out to him about his flannel, Hoffenheimer was on a hot streak; in just a year, he had documented and proven the entire provenance of a much-contested Balenciaga saddle bag owned by a prominent influencer, debunked the heavily-publicized uncovering of thirty deadstock 60’s mod dresses in San Francisco, and proven—with methods known only to him—that a pair of spraypaint-covered selvedge jeans did, indeed, once belong to Banksy.
“Once or twice a year, somebody gets in touch with me and claims to have an alpha series Pendleton flannel,” Hoffenheimer told me, “and maybe one out of every ten of those cases deserve any attention at all. Every one so far had turned out to be a forgery. So when Rodrigo contacted me, I didn’t get my hopes up.” (Reminder that Rodrigo asked that Shrieks and Whispers not use his real name to protect his privacy. All uses of his name by others have thus been altered.)
The authentication process is long, frustrating, and according to Hoffenheimer, largely a formality. “If you know your stuff, you know if something is real. I can always tell in a few minutes whether or not a vintage item is a forgery. Then it’s just a matter of getting enough tests and analyses done to show it historically and scientifically. But my first hunch has never been wrong.”
And his verdict on Rodrigo’s alpha-series flannel? “It’s real,” he said flatly. “I mean, have you seen it?” I hadn’t, at least not at the time of our first interview. “The subtlety of the weaving is unmistakably Pendleton’s in his prime. It has all the minute, characteristic flaws that give handmade flannels their character, but since it’s a Pendleton you can hardly tell with the naked eye.”
And that’s not all: “as for the pattern, it’s the closest thing to a dead giveaway you could see. Even the very best forgeries fail to imitate Pendleton’s original knack for color. In his journals, he wrote about how inspired he was by Rosseau’s use of color in his jungle paintings, and the influence shows itself in genuine alpha series flannels in a way that forgeries fall short.”
Once Hoffenheimer saw Rodrigo’s flannel, he scheduled a battery of tests to authenticate the garment. Then, there were two major questions he needed to answer: who was the previous owner whose estate sale Rodrigo had bought the flannel from? And who was the mysterious Irish woman who had called?
When I met Rodrigo for our first in-person interview, he was wearing two flannels over a silk dress shirt with the collar popped, raw denim jeans with honeycomb fades behind the knees, and Chelsea boots. He would have been a pretty unremarkable-looking bald hipster were it not for his eclectic outfit and the anxious look I could see in his eyes through the thick, round frames of his glasses.
“It’s important that word about this doesn’t get out,” Rodrigo told me, “because if it becomes widespread information that I own an alpha series flannel, I might start getting, you know, targeted for thefts or even attacks.”
He sipped his pawpaw-yeast smoothie warily, trying to hide nervous glances around. “I have to admit that I’m a bit anxious lately. I don’t get out of the house very much unless I need to go grocery shopping, or take the flannel to a lab for testing.”
That, coincidentally, is exactly what we were going to be doing for the next few days. Hoffenheimer was going to meet us and bring us to the European Flannel Recognition Institute in Zurich, where a state-of-the-art image capture/AI analysis system would be able to deliver an objective verdict on the flannel’s authenticity.
“These are the types of tests that are worth pursuing,” Rodrigo told me, “because they’re objective. People in the vintage clothing world always have a motive. But science has no motive.” He again spoke with the cautious authority on the subject, a stranger to the cruel world of authentication just trying to acclimate.
He showed me a report—a packet of stapled papers from a thick binder that I rarely saw him without—from a carbon-dating lab where he and Hoffenheimer had the flannel tested. The date lined up exactly with Pendleton’s creation of the alpha series flannels.
“But look at this,” he told me, and produced another report—a qualitative analysis from Edmund Lancaster, head curator of the European Museum of Outerwear and, supposedly, the world’s foremost expert on alpha series flannels.
Rodrigo had highlighted a passage of the ten-page document: ‘this garment is, beyond any doubt, a forgery, and quite a poor one at that. Its pattern and color are totally out of sync with the known style of Pendleton in his prime. If I were to display this piece alongside the eight other confirmed original flannels, even a fool could see that it is totally different. In my professional opinion, this poor facsimile was machine-made in the past 20 years.’
The last sentence was underlined as well as highlighted. “What this guy says is totally misaligned with the scientific tests,” Rodrigo explained a bit feverishly. Then he handed me the printout of an article from Wool Clothes Quarterly headlined ‘Lancaster Decrees Entire Alpha Series Found.’
“This centerpiece of this schmuck’s resume is that he supposedly documented the entire alpha series,” Rodrigo said. “He says there’s only eight left. So now when I come along, challenging that notion, well, that’s a threat to his cred in the establishment, you know? So of course he’s gonna deny it.”
Later, I reached out to Lancaster for an interview, and he agreed to one. Once he found out that I had been talking to Rodrigo and Hoffenheimer though, he backed out. I received only a short email: “The less that is said about the alpha series forgery you’re writing about, the better. All original flannels have already been found and documented, and Wilhiem Hoffenheimer is an upstart twerp who is in over his head. I offer you some advice: forget about it lest you embarrass yourself and your publication. Do not contact me again.” Luckily, nobody reads Shrieks and Whipsers and I’m already deeply embarrassed of myself, for wholly unrelated reasons.
Hoffenheimer arrived exactly five minutes early. He perpetually seemed as though he was just barely on time—through every interaction we had, he carried an undramatic urgency in his every move and word. He was dressed in a light grey suit—he later told me that it was a vintage British piece, a gift that a wealthy European woman had given him after he proved that her husband’s mistress wore fake pearls.
An Uber was waiting to take us to the airport. Rodrigo had been awkwardly holding on to a hard shell carry-on suitcase the whole time, which he gingerly wheeled out of the cafe and into the car. Inside that suitcase, enclosed in a state-of-the-art light and humidity-controlled box, was the flannel.
The whole first flight, which ended with a layover in New York, Hoffenheimer pressed Rodrigo to reach out to his Grailed reseller friend to gather more information on the flannel’s previous owner. Rodrigo, for some reason, was hesitant at first (“They’re not the kind of person you just call out of the blue, you know?”) but he eventually sent a text message. After some coaxing—coached by Hoffenheimer, who called himself an expert on getting people to divulge—the reseller finally gave Rodrigo the flannels’s deceased previous owner’s information.
His name was Howie Ronsenbaum, and it wasn’t long before Hoffenheimer was testing the limits on the in-air wifi by plugging Rosenbaum’s name into every database he could access. Hoffenheimer sent emails out to other flannel collectors he knew, but nobody had ever heard of the man.
But by the time we landed for our second layover in Copenhagen, he had established a barebones profile: Rosenbaum was a plumber from Portland who got into day trading after he retired. He had no family; he was an only child who never married. There were few available details about his life outside of his employment and his flannel collection.
Rosenbaum was active on an online day-trading forum, but his posts were uninformative—he either discussed strategy or lamented capital gains taxes. In one online interaction from 2005, Hoffenheimer showed me, a member of the forum asked Rosenbaum what he was going to do with the profits from a recent successful bet on tech penny stocks.
‘Probably just buy some clothes,’ he replied, ‘that’s my main spending weakness.’ Nothing Hoffenheimer didn’t already know.
No living person seemed to have known Rosenbaum in any capacity—nobody except Rodrigo’s reseller friend, who hung up on me when I called him and then blocked my number.
“The bastard knows something,” Hoffenheimer told me, “he has to. He’s protecting somebody. Probably himself. I mean, this Rosenbaum guy had this huge flannel collection, which included an alpha series piece. Then he died. Fine. The missing piece is how this reseller got a hold of his collection. Something morally grey went down. I suspect elder abuse. He probably built a fake relationship with this lonely old man with no family and somehow got himself written into his will. Happens all the time. I know who to call.”
Provenance is a central part of vintage garment authentication. No matter how precisely you test your garment, through carbon dating or professional analysis, if it seems like a flannel just showed up in the world one day, nobody in the vintage clothing world will believe you. The mystery reseller’s suspicious unwillingness to talk was a massive roadblock in Rodrigo and Hoffenheimer’s quest.
Meanwhile, I was pursuing my own line of inquiry. Going through my notes and phone interviews with Rodrigo, I realized that Hoffenheimer had lost sight of another potential source of information; the woman who approached Rodrigo in the cafe. When I asked Hoffenheimer about it, he snorted dismissively.
“It would be impossible to find her, and she was probably lying about her family anyway. This happens all the time—people with a good eye for vintage clothes who make up a story to try to get people people’s items for free or for a steep discount. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a story like hers I’d be richer than I already am.”
Still, I thought it was worth looking into, and I traced the Pendleton family tree through the generations and narrowed the search down to seven possible relatives. I sent them all messages on LinkedIn and got reported for five of them. One woman, however, responded: her name was Rhonda Foster, and she claimed that she was the woman who approached Rodrigo in the cafe. We set a time for an interview after I got back to Portland.
We arrived in Zurich a little after 5:00 PM; our appointment at the European Flannel Recognition Institute was the next morning. Hoffenheimer left to have dinner with a Swiss friend of his, who collected vintage Jaeger-LeCoultre watches and wanted him to verify some new, suspicious acquisitions.
Rodrigo locked up his flannel in the Baur au Lac hotel room safe, then wrapped the whole safe in a thick metal chain with a padlock. “You can’t be too careful,” he said. He told me that he was going to visit the European Museum of Outerwear and invited me to join him. They had two alpha series flannels on display and he wanted to take a look.
Rodrigo was like a kid in a candy store at the museum. He certainly had a specific taste in fashion; he pointed out a long, houndstooth overcoat and told me how he’d love to wear it with an all-white outfit and “some kind of hypebeast sneaker.” The room full of vintage Armani suits, however, was “a bunch of oversized, sloppy nonsense.” The ‘Pleats of the Depression’ exhibit was “gonna be the next big trend.” Most interesting of all, he told me that the ‘Patterned Blazers From The 20s to Today’ exhibit, which took up the whole sixth floor, had some pieces that even a “frumpy, unkempt journalist” like me could pull off.
But when we got to the Pendleton retrospective, the glass enclosure that was supposed to hold the centerpiece of the collection—the alpha series flannels—was empty. Rodrigo was dejected and I was suspicious. I asked a tour guide what happened to the missing flannels, and she gave me a vague answer about how they had to be indefinitely removed for “restoration-related purposes.” When I pressed her, she admitted that they had actually been sold to a wealthy collector, but refused to give me any information on the buyer.
We headed back to the hotel and ran into Hoffenheimer in the lobby. He casually tossed me a gold watch, which I recognized as a Jaeger-LeCoultre Triple Calendar Moonphase with a beautiful patina. “You like that?” he asked. “Keep it. It’s fake, not worth the metal it’s made of.” He turned to look at Rodrigo. “By the way, your friend got nabbed last night.”
“What?”
“Your Grailed reseller friend? Remember? Who sold you the flannel that started this whole saga?”
“He got arrested?”
“Yup. Elder abuse, just like I suspected. He’s befriending old people all over Portland just so he can inherit their vintage clothes. Including old Howie Rosenbaum. So you can consider that loose end tied up.”
“Jesus.”
“Now we just have to figure out how Howie got a hold of it.”
“I don’t believe he got arrested.”
“Really makes you wonder who your true friends are, huh?”
As Rodrigo processed this new information, I told Hoffenheimer about the alpha series flannels that were missing from the museum. His expression went from surprised to livid as I relayed information about the unidentified collector who had purchased them.
“So much for being an honorable fucking institution,” he raged in the elevator. “Not only are they hindering public access—for profit!—but they’re covering up for this collector! Who the hell do they think they are?” He was determined to find out who had bought them.
The next morning, I met Rodrigo and Hoffenheimer outside the Baur au Lac. Due to Shrieks and Whisper’s budget constraints, I was unable to book a room in the same hotel and had to stay an hour outside Zurich in an Airbnb, which turned out to be a vinegar refinery/24-hour free-range chicken slaughterhouse.
We took a train to the European Flannel Recognition Institute (EFRI,) which was in a basement wing of the European Museum of Outerwear. We met the resident Wool Scientist Dr. Josefin Ullkunskap, who is most well known for her best-selling book ‘Hand Weaving and Machine Learning: Garment Authentication Techniques for the 21st Century and Beyond.’
Rodrigo unpacked his flannel, and for the first time, I laid eyes on it. It was a classic checkered gradient pattern, with squares of turquoise that faded gently into a light gray, bisected periodically by stark vertical lines of brown-orange. On closer inspection, though, I saw many other colors woven in; reds along with the orange, every hue of blue and green incorporated expertly into the turquoise sections. Hoffenheimer’s comparison to Rosseau rang true, but the flannel also evoked Signac’s most complex works.
I wanted to stay objective, but it was undoubtedly the most remarkable flannel I’d ever seen. If it was, as the curator-critic Lancaster wrote, “a forgery, and quite a poor one at that,” I couldn’t imagine what a genuine one would look like.
Dr. Ullkunskap gently put the flannel on a model torso, and a gyroscopic camera took 100 hi-def scans of it from different angles. She added them to a pool of data that EFRI had access to, which included scans of the two genuine alpha series flannels that had been on display in the European Museum of Outerwear before they had been purchased. Also in the dataset were scans of known forgeries and mass-produced flannels from Pendelton and other brands from the last 60 years.
Dr. Ullkenskap explained that her software broke each flannel scan down into a series of fragments that she used to train the AI to recognize alpha series Pendleton work, as well as forgeries and other brands. Each fragment would be analyzed fifty times, each time with slightly altered criteria, in order to provide the most accurate result.
We stood behind Dr. Ullkenskap on her computer and watched her work. Hoffenheimer coughed. “So, whatever happened to those two Pendleton flannels that were in the museum?”
“They’ve been removed for restoration-related purposes,” Dr. Ullkenskap replied, parroting the same talking point as the tour guide from the day before.
“Oh yeah? I heard that some collector bought them.”
Dr. Ullkenskap shifted uneasily in her chair. “Where did you hear that?”
“Oh, you know. Grapevine.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about it either way,” she said, and it was clear that the conversation was over. Hoffenheimer looked at me and mouthed ‘she knows something.’
Finally, the program finished running and Dr. Ullkenskap scrolled through the results. “Ninety-three percent chance of being genuine,” she announced.
Rodrigo let out a tense breath and flashed a relieved smile. Hoffenheimer’s expression didn’t change much—after all, he had already decided that the flannel was real, and the AI authentication was just another reaffirmation. His documentation portfolio needed it more than he did. He was more worried at that point about the provenance, and what he was running up against a wall on what he considered his main leads—the grailed reseller and the flannels missing from the museum.
“Ninety-three percent!” Rodrigo exclaimed, finally breaking the silence. “That’s awesome!”
“Yes. I would say, at this point, that it’s definitely an original Pendelton,” Dr. Ullkenskap said. She removed it from the model and Rodrigo packed it up in its special container.
“I’ll meet you gentlemen outside,” Hoffenheimer told us. “I’d like to discuss something with Dr. Ullkenskap before we leave.”
Fifteen minutes later, he met us outside the museum, holding a packet of papers—the printout of the report, with a name scribbled in the margins of the front page. “Baroness Bridgette O’Kildaire,” he announced. “That’s who bought the flannel.”
I asked him how he found out. “Because I’m the best in the business,” he said, grinning widely.
Shrieks & Whispers 
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