In terms of Hollywood royalty, Steve McQueen is an oft-heralded king of action movies, with films like The Great Escape and Bullitt to his credit. Bullitt is to many Mustang owners what The Godfather is to crime-movie junkies, a bible of badassery that belongs in every collection. It isn’t every movie that gets its own muscle car remake, after all, though Ford has launched two Bullitt edition Mustangs in the past decade alone.
But some Steve McQueen fans have a lot more money to spend on memorabilia than just a tribute car. Hemmings Auto Blog reports that the tweed jacket worn by McQueen’s character in Bullitt is heading to auction soon, and is expected to fetch over $800,000. For a tweed jacket!
That mind-blowing sum certainly sounds exaggerated, but other pieces of McQueen apparel have fetched close to a million buckets at auction. The racing suit McQueen wore during the filming of the LeMans movie brought $984,000 at auction just last December. The Heuer Monaco watch McQueen also wore during that movie sold for $650,000, more than double the pre-auction estimate. The low-end estimate for the jacket is $600,000.
The tweed jacket was worn by McQueen during some of the most famous scenes in Bullitt, including the San Francisco street chase and the final shootout at the airport. The jacket was modified to make it cooler to wear during the chase scenes, and it had been on display by Warner Brothers prior to heading to auction.
It’s the kind of centerpiece of a Steve McQueen collection that most of us will never know.