The White Stripes guitar was actually given to him. They weren't sold in the '90s, lol. And he hasn't really used it outside the Stripes, I feel like he just wanted to be challenged by a more difficult instrument in that context. Not as a whole.
@TheAntiMainstream From what I understand he owns a large collection of guitars, and my guess is he plays all of them. In The White Stripes his signature guitar was a piece of shit piece of plastic he got at Sears.
His signature ? The Airline '59 is not his signature guitar ... And I can see that you never played on an Airline, "piece of shit" is not really the right word. Anyway yeah he owns a lot of guitars, some really rare and old Gretsch model.
I've played a few old Montgomery Ward guitars, and... most of them are shit. Never having been set up after 40 years of just sitting can do that to anything, but other than that, the ones that are well maintained and set up perfectly don't play as well as most production guitars today. Interesting sounding pups, but not really all that useful sonically. The old Silvertone amps he tends to use are kind of cool. They overdrive real easy; especially the little combo amps.