Earlier this year, the Artis Zoo Museum in Amsterdam unveiled a handbag alongside a massive dinosaur skeleton — one made of "lab-grown T. rex leather."
The highly publicized item was up for auction on Thursday. But it failed to sell. The Paris auction house Drouot noted that bids were well below expected. Auctioneers Giquello had touted the "one-of-a-kind" piece to sell for more than $500,000, but bids barely broke the $150,000 mark, according to the auction house.
With no precedent to go on, Alexandre Giquello, whose auction house organized the sale, told press agency AFP that they had to "come up with a price" that would reflect both the amount of investment required to create the bag and its rarity.
An experimental product
Polish fashion label Enfin Leve designed the bag as part of its line of experimental clothing. But it was the material, not the design, that drew the most attention. "It has a character unlike anything we've handled. Dense, primal, operating on its own logic," the label wrote on social media.
