Banksy’s bulletproof Union Jack vest on sale for €360,000

Designed by Banksy and worn by grime star Stormzy during his legendary Glastonbury headline set in 2019, the anonymous street artist’s bulletproof vest emblazoned with the Union Jack has been put up for sale with an estimate of up to £300,000 (€360,000).  

The vest belongs to Banksy’s Gross Domestic Product homewares line, which was first displayed on a shopfront in Croydon in South London in 2019 to comment on the impending commercialisation of the Banksy brand. 

In 2020, Banksy’s Stormzy vest was nominated for a Beazley Design of the Year prize, and was subsequently donated to the Design Museum in London by the rapper. 

The vest listed for sale, one in a series of five, will be shown during Frieze Week before it is offered in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction and will be displayed at the company’s New Bond Street Galleries from 3-9 October. 

Emma Baker, head of contemporary evening sale at Sotheby’s, said: “Given an iconic stature by Stormzy during his legendary Glastonbury performance, this reinterpretation of a classic piece of modern-day police-issue armour is Banksy at his best.” 

“In a way only Banksy can, he manages to powerfully condense a complex social issue through one redolent object. There is no doubt this artwork is more pertinent now than when the first vest debuted at Glastonbury – an event that saw it become the symbol of a defining cultural moment.” 

Indeed, Banksy made the provocative stab-proof vest to draw attention to social and political unrest across the UK. The armour that repurposes the visual strength and cultural weight of the Union flag to symbolise experiences of racism and violence, as well as endemic surges in knife crime in contemporary Britain. 

Only last month, actor and musician Idris Elba joined UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer for a new anti-knife crime coalition. Ahead of the meeting, Elba said that “we need to tackle the root causes of knife crime, not just the symptoms.” He described the coalition as a “positive step toward rehabilitating our communities from the inside out”. 

The vest sale comes almost six years to the day since Banksy intervened in a Sotheby’s auction when his piece ‘Girl with Balloon’ auto-destructed as the gavel came down on 5 October 2018.  

The ‘destroyed’ artwork instantly gained notoriety as a unique piece of performance art. It became the freshly titled ‘Love is in the Bin’, marking the first time an artwork has been created during a live sale.  

In 2021, the artwork returned to auction in its new form, selling for a record £18.6 million (€22.3m).

Additional sources • Sotherby’s