[YeahItSuda]The Name of the Life Vest

The 'Other Sea' Evoked by the Beige Vest at the London Auction House

Last weekend, a beige life vest appeared at an auction house in London. It featured twelve pockets filled with cork sewn onto canvas fabric, with shoulder supports and side ties. This vest belonged to Laura Mabel Francatelli, a first-class passenger aboard the Titanic. The auctioneer described it as "an item that may appear only once in a generation," and indeed, the vest sold for 670,000 pounds (approximately 1.34 billion won), far surpassing its estimated price of 250,000 to 350,000 pounds. This was the first time a life vest from a Titanic survivor was listed at auction.

Life jacket of a Titanic survivor listed as an auction item. Henry Aldridge & Son Ltd

Laura Francatelli was the secretary to fashion designer Lucy Duff-Gordon. She survived by boarding Lifeboat No. 1 together with her employer and her employer’s husband. That lifeboat was designed for forty people but was launched with only twelve aboard. The Titanic embarked on its maiden voyage in April 1912, but struck an iceberg and sank; out of about 2,200 people on board, only around 700 survived. The vest bore the signatures of other survivors who were rescued from the same lifeboat. It is an item that not only brought one person out of the water, but also holds the names of many others.

People are not paying money for an old piece of cloth. They are paying for the night that cloth endured. Whose body it clung to, which sea it crossed, how it returned without sinking into the depths. That is why, as time passes, clocks, letters, or vests from sunken ships eventually gain price tags. Bodies may disappear, but objects remain. The remaining objects find themselves with descriptions, glass display cases, and auction blocks.

Yet, a life vest carries a stronger name than other relics. 'Life-saving.' The name itself makes a promise: to save, to float, to hold on to at least one person in the final moments. Because of this, even at the moment a value is assigned, this item cannot become a simple collectible. A vest that saved a life becomes more vivid as it grows old. That wear and tear is the very length of time that was survived.

When reading articles about Titanic auctions, there is one peculiar aspect: the survivors’ signatures. What remains on the vest is not seawater, but names. Some nights do not end after soaking an object; instead, they leave behind the handwriting of those who survived. For this reason, the vest appears less like debris from a sunken ship and more like a collective statement signed by the rescued. Even after the ship went down, someone was still able to write their name, and those names have followed the vest to the auction house 114 years later.

For Koreans, a life vest is not a distant object. During the Sewol ferry disaster, it was announced that out of 269 recovered victims, 235 were wearing life vests. The vests found at the Paengmok Port lost-and-found storage bore manufacturing dates of "May 1994" and were labeled as Japanese products—the same year the Sewol was built in Japan. At the time, there were also reports questioning whether these twenty-year-old vests had actually functioned as intended.

The Titanic vest bears the signatures of survivors. The Sewol vest bears only a manufacturing date. One became an artifact after saving lives, while the other remained as evidence, unable to save lives. Both vests were designed to float in water, yet one ends up at an auction, the other becomes a question.

Looking at the photograph of the beige vest at the London auction house, one recalls another sea before thinking of the North Atlantic 114 years ago. A vest that saved lives accrues value over time; a vest that could not save lives never does, even as time passes. Instead, a date is attached. Some vests are marked with the names of survivors; others are left only with their manufacturing date. What separated the two seas was not the height of the waves, but the act of rescue in the final moments.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.