Banksy stab-proof vest made famous by rapper Stormzy sold for €930,000

Banksy’s iconic stab-proof vest decorated with the union jack flag, made famous by rapper Stormzy during his 2019 Glastonbury headline performance, has been sold in London for £780,000 (€932,000).

The vest was one of five created by the anonymous British street artist and was put up for sale with an original estimate of £300,000 (€360,000). It 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.

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.

The sale of the vest, offered in Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction and displayed at the company’s New Bond Street Galleries from 3-9 October, was 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).

Last month, London police charged two men with burglary after another ‘Girl with Balloon’ was stolen from a gallery in the UK capital.