Every few years, it rides into town on a glossy white horse with the whole mixed-up mythology of frontier America crammed into its saddle bags: cowboy-core. We saw it most recently in late March, when Beyoncé turned country music on its head with the release of “Cowboy Carter.” That country-inflected album, still holding firm at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, not only lit up the BeyHive but simultaneously loosed a torrent of tropes and memes and posts and pictorials about cowboy style.
What is it? What does it stand for? Who owns it? How do you arrive at any single meaning of “cowboy” when the stylistic variants run from western to modern to rhinestone to preppy to line-dancing Saturday night buckaroo to Black?
“The notion of the real has always haunted the figure of the cowboy,” said Josh Garrett-Davis, curator of Western American history at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif. “There is this paradoxical relationship with authenticity.”
Nowhere is this clearer than when fashion gets in on the act. One season a designer like Pharrell Williams is making his debut for Louis Vuitton with a predictable ode to Paris and “Frenchness.” By the next, he’s presenting a collection hailed as “Wild West meets melting pot America” that showcases every imaginable trope from a grab bag of postwar cowboy kitsch: fringe, cowhide valises, embroidered rodeo jackets (in the style of the Nashville designer Manuel Cuevas), turquoise snap fasteners on shirts, steel-toed boots and 10-gallon hats.
Conjure an image of vast photo murals inside the Vuitton Foundation depicting John Ford country. Then populate the Big Sky landscapes with models representative of a new narrative, one updated to include the Indigenous, Mexican and Black cowboys who, in reality, made up a significant portion of the cowboy work force, as Dr. Garrett-Davis said.
Part reclamation and part virtue signaling, the Vuitton show was also squarely on trend. And it was just one among many recent forays into a revival of cowboy aesthetics. Cowboy-core surfaced seemingly everywhere, in imagery ranging from Gucci ads featuring Snoop Dogg in a satin cowboy suit and string tie to a new pictorial in M, the style magazine of Le Monde, starring Amber Valletta posed like some hardscrabble ranch gal from Richard Avedon’s portrait series “In the American West.”
Even Dapper Dan, the Harlem clothier famous for his hip-hop inflected logo-wear, has gotten into the act. For a new Gap collaboration, Dapper Dan — né Daniel R. Day — swapped out his slick Gucci collabs for stuff you might expect to see at Cheyenne Frontier Days: denim button-downs, cotton Oxfords embroidered with 10-gallon hats.
“We were some of the original cowboys,” Dapper Dan said in a statement about the collaboration. “But we are also the faces of the world to come. We are the urban cowboys.”
Shifts in our understandings of cowboy demographics are only part of what makes the latest iteration of cowboy style worth noting, said Sonya Abrego, a design historian and author of “Westernwear: Postwar American Fashion and Culture.” “I am always trying to correct this notion that western wear is purpose-built, designed for horseback riding and functional labor,” she said.
Though cowboy gear was actual workwear during the earliest days of westward expansion, and continues to play a functional role in the gear worn by ropers, steer wrestlers and bronc riders on the rodeo circuit, according to Paul Woody, the chief marketing officer for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, it is just as often a costume: a surefire way to telegraph and perform Americanness.
“Ask for a symbol of the United States,” Dr. Garrett-Davis said, “and what most people come up with is the cowboy.”
Oddly, though, the gear that real range riders wore bore scant resemblance to the get-ups we use to symbolize the cowboy. Real 19th-century cowpokes typically dressed in heavy canvas trousers, bowlers and wore rawhide chaps as armor against thorny vegetation and the general filth of the job.
“You’ll notice there is not a speck of dust on Beyoncé,” Dr. Abrego observed wryly. Of course there isn’t. As a pop music goddess, Beyoncé’s job is to apotheosize Wild West iconography, not get down in the mud. And in this, she is dabbling in the patriotic cosplay intrinsic to a lot of cowboy-core, gear developed not on the range but out of the flashy costumes performers in entertainments like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show once wore.
“What I love about the latest iteration is how it’s creating room for younger queer kids or people of color to explore and interpret the recombination of elements in different ways for a different eras,” Dr. Abrego said, “and to get the word out that the West was a lot more diverse than the images we’ve always seen.”
