Belt buckle. Consultation.

Hello. I want to know. Is this belt buckle military? There are no characters or letters. The size is 80х53 mm. It seems tin. Thank.

 

Very possibly from the 1970s. A very popular accessory with a tooled leather belt.

Debora

 

Stepan, you are in Ukraine, aren't you? That is probably relevant in this case (former USSR).

 

Yes, but there were none in the Soviet Union. This buckle came from England.

 

Ah, so a Soviet connection would be unlikely. But it is also unlikely that Western European military had a star on their buckles.

 

Maybe it's a homemade buckle. It does not look like factory work.

 

It's a style that was popular in the USA in the 70s. Men and some women would buy hand-made belts and then add a funky buckle. The leather belts would die of old age and people saved the buckles. That's when they made all those fake Tiffany Pony Express buckles that keep showing up.

 

I have a rare belt buckle. I think a grizzly bear. USA.
Masterpiece Collection.
I looked on the Internet and did not find anything like it.

 

Sweet Baby James in 1969.

Debora

 

Buckles of America is a 1990s trademark. You can verify the exact dates here on the official U.S. Patent and Trademark Office web site.

http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4807:37d9gr.3.1

Your buckle features a grizzly bear, a type of brown bear indigenous to North America. (It is also a symbol of California, the state where Buckles of America was headquartered.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_bear



Debora

 

"Buckles of America," of Rocklin CA, the company that made the grizzly belt buckle, may no longer be in business as Debora points out below.

However, I suspect they sold thousands of these buckles, possibly as recently as 2002. Sometimes items like this are so common that one will not find them anywhere on the internet.
If an item can't be found on the internet, that does not mean it is rare or valuable; often it means that the item is so common that nobody posts photos online

 

all_fakes, are you sure that wasn't an archived page? According to the U.S. government web site, the trademark was cancelled in 2002. And nothing has a retail price of $7 any more (or is made in the USA for that matter.)

Debora

 

You could be entirely correct. I only did a very brief search. I didn't see any "belt buckle collector associations" but there might be such. Often belt buckles were made by companies that also did other types of metal casting, which can complicate web searches.

 

I remember the grizzly buckle, we even had them here in the Netherlands, probably still do.
But it is quite possible that something as American as that was never allowed into Ukraine at the time, so it would be considered rare there. And if it is not sold online, it would still be rare there.

 

There was a thing for USSR looking fashion here in the 70s. The buckle was probably made here. I've had a fair few of those Buckles of America ones, too.

 

The fact is that these buckles were handed to me from England. In the Soviet Union, this was not.

 

What I meant was, that the grizzly bear buckle could be considered rare where you are, because they were never imported there.
They were imported into Western Europe, like England, where you got yours. Here they wouldn't be considered rare.
I have bought things abroad that would be considered rare here, but not where I bought them. It could be the same with your grizzly buckle, rare where you are, but not rare in England or the rest of Western Europe.

 

OP’s buckle is not military.