How the West Was Worn

It’s not just Beyoncé. Everyone is a cowgirl now.

When Beyoncé popped up at the 2024 Grammys in a white Stetson hat and clothing from Pharrell’s Western FW24 Louis Vuitton menswear collection, it wasn’t just a possible hint of country music to come. As with other popular trends of the 2020s, like balletcore, cottagecore, eclectic grandpa, or gorpcore, the move toward Western-inspired clothing that was already happening supports a desire to wear that which comes with its own history. It’s utilitarian but also supported by decades of tradition. It’s easy. It says a lot without seeming like it’s saying anything at all. Yet with more eyes on trends than ever before—and thus more participants—it can be hard to pin any one trend down as “the one.” Leave it to Beyoncé to try.

Aligning with the announcement of her new album , Beyoncé has frequently appeared over the last months in Western attire: at the Super Bowl in all-black with cowboy hat and bolo tie; on Valentine’s Day in a red hat with a red minidress and also a black hat with a body-baring black lace dress; a gray Stetson hat to match her bedazzled gray blazer and handkerchief tied babushka-style around her head at her surprise LUAR NYFW appearance, a denim bolero jacket and jeans by Marine Serre; and even at the launch of her new hair-care line, she made sure to wear a white bolo tie to the event.Rumors of Beyoncé “going country” existed prior to 2022’s dance-inspired , and cowboy hats appeared frequently during its reign: in the album art, promotional materials, and onstage for its tour. In 2021, Beyoncé released a Black-cowboy-inspired IVY PARK collection. She wore cowboy gear for that too. Cast an eye over Beyoncé’s 27-year career and you will see that cowboy hats have crowned her countless times. As far back as the visual debut of Beyoncé the solo artist in 2000 as the guest artist on rapper Amil’s “I Got That,” we see her wearing a black leather cowboy hat. On each side are red flames emanating from a lone star.

The Texan cowgirl look was a continuation of an aesthetic Beyoncé and her bandmates often donned in Destiny’s Child, first appearing in a video with 1999’s “Bug a Boo.” Tina Knowles—Beyoncé’s mother and stylist—frequently designed with a Western point of view. They were four young women from Texas in cowboy hats; fringe; buckskin or bandanas; silver medallions; turquoise accessories; large buckled belts; and many variations upon the silver studding you’d find on a boot, but on Destiny’s Child was applied to corsets and skirts. Through their costumes alone, one could track the many overlapping histories contributing to the popular image of Western fashion: the denim workwear of American cowhands and Mexican vaqueros, Native American printmaking, beading, and suede, Eastern European embroidery, and the subsequent glamour of the rhinestone cowboy topped off with the casual confidence of millions who wear it all not as costume, but in daily life.I don’t like to admit it, but when Beyoncé wore that Stetson hat to the Grammys, I didn’t take it as a hint. You don’t need to remind me that before she released in 2016, Beyoncé posted a photo looking like the happiest person ever to sniff a lemon, but consider this: Beyoncé was born and raised in Houston, Texas. She was not, however, raised on a lemon farm. Those who track Beyoncé’s artistic exploits have come to expect—no: embrace—no: endure the unexpected, and yet sometimes, perhaps purposefully so, Beyoncé does the expected just because we expect it.It’s not as if Western wear is only having its moment in the sun thanks to Beyoncé. Lana Del Rey announced a country album. Kacey Musgraves released her latest, , a return to Texan form after the more pop-curious . Rihanna (who might be our fashion oracle) met up with cowboy hat aficionado and Beverly Hills Real Housewives Kyle Richards (who might be dating country musician Morgan Wade) in Aspen last December. Rihanna wore blue jeans, a brown cowboy hat, a turquoise belt and blue suede cowboy boots. Even A$AP Rocky got in on the fun with a Bottega Venetta cow-print shearling jacket. But Rihanna didn’t just use the look on vacation. She wears it again on the recent cover of Vogue China, stamping her seal of approval yet again in a pearl- and jewel-encrusted cowboy hat and blazer.

This year we’ve seen supermodel Bella Hadid go from continental fashionista to , appearing publicly at her new boyfriend’s rodeos and privately (via Instagram) in barns, usually next to a horse she seems to have befriended, often in a cowboy hat, workwear, and an unconcerned sense of style. In the now infamous TikTok boasting a lengthy wellness routine, she takes it further in a white ribbed snap-down top, the kind you’d imagine a cowgirl wears to bed. She captured it all under rustic wooden beams. There’s an antique red cabinet in the background, too. A marble countertop is the fantasy’s only betrayal, but trinkets displayed on a highly distressed, untreated wood table bring us back. Hadid then throws a tarnished brown leather diary on a couch layered with a quilt. For Hadid, it seems an embrace of a lifestyle rather than an adherence to a trend. I’d be this way too if I were a horse girl falling in love with a cowboy. I’d even name my daughter Marfa-Mae.But why has the cowboy aroused this simultaneous attention and not other geographical American personas? Why not the hedonism of the Hawaiian shirt dude, the leisurely wisdom of a coastal grandmother, or the dopey charm of a Montanan lumberjack? Are chaps really such an important item that they needed to appear on the FW24 runways of Stella McCartney, DSquared2, Sportmax, Vacquera, and Louis Vuitton? It’s not just chaps. Bolo ties, fringe jackets, Western-style shirts with embroidered icons, and decorative yokes appeared in FW24 collections from Prada, Chloé, Elie Saab, Valentino, Isabel Marant, Molly Goddard, and more.The notion of “going country” isn’t new. The first time promoted jeans in 1935, it was not recommended for daily use, but rather as the ideal item to wear to a dude ranch, a vacation spot where city folk (“dudes”) travel west to experience the allegedly “open” frontier, abundant freedom, rampant individualism, and cows. America was in its Great Depression and filmgoers escaped their woes by traveling to extremes: the impossibly glamorous, technologically advanced art deco like that of a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musical, or to “simpler” times, the Old West as seen in the Westerns of John Ford and John Wayne. The films glorified American ideologies, seeking to establish an image of America that would soon be over. The notion of a cowboy is much like Marie Antoinette now, our problematic fave we keep coming back to. Today we may not be in a depression, only an aching misery, but we may still look to Western-wear fashion for the same relief. With anxiety about AI, our social media apps under threat of being snatched by the government (TikTok) or bought and ominously renamed to a single letter (X), plus a world landscape that promises our glum present will lead to a likely more miserable future, it’s not hard to see why people could crave the unbothered, time-worn ease of cowboy attire.Perhaps the pinnacle of Western wear as an escapist art form—divorced from any connection to workwear—occurred during the Cold War. Designer Nudie Cohn’s rhinestoned and embroidered suits (affectionately titled “Nudie Suits”) outfitted a range of artists: Johnny Cash (understated) and Dolly Parton (overstated); Elvis (iconic) and Sly Stone (iconoclastic); Cher (American hero) and Ronald Regan (American villain).It’s a style one could argue evolved into the Alessandro Michele-era Gucci suit: loud, detailed, and quaint. In 2020 some Western-inspired looks went down a special Gucci runway staged at an American shrine (Grauman’s Chinese Theater: where Hollywood immortals are cemented, surrounded by a Walk of Fame which served as the models’ runway). Coming from an Italian, the look probably qualifies as “spaghetti Western,” examining the culture from an alternative angle, not in the effort of myth-making but to make something out of the myth. The popular Nudie Suit created myths of its artists too and coincided with a thriving country music industry when Western films and television series were also at their peak and the Kinsey report was still rather new. Cold War questions about American freedom as well as masculinity were quelled by the soothingly fake image of the stoic, courageous, laconic American male hero: a white cowboy like Porter Wagoner who, as flashy as he often looked in a Nudie Suit, still embodied the Western tradition.

What surprised many people about Beyoncé propelling us into yet another country era was that we aren’t really even so far behind the last one. The aptly named 2019 “yee-haw agenda” saw massive increases in Western styles steeped in a political design. Even Cardi B was lassoed into the moment, performing as a cotton-candy cowgirl at the Houston Rodeo. It was a time when Telfar Clemens, LaQuan Smith, and Pyer Moss all put Western influence in their collections, and we witnessed the come-up of stars like Megan Thee Stallion and Lizzo (both from Houston, by the way). Solange’s project fulfilled the agenda most artistically, but Lil Nas X was the face of the moment. His song “Old Town Road” challenged racial musical divides and went on to become the longest-running number-one in Hot 100 history. His outfits (such as a Versace bubblegum-pink, gold-studded bolero jacket with matching pants, boots, belt, hat, and harness) contested the heteronormative aesthetic of the country genre. All together, the “yee-haw agenda” posited that country could be cool. It could have mass appeal. It could be young but it also was Black, and queer and feminine and modern. Within the existing country scene itself, singer Musgraves (who, even as an established white star continues to face an uphill battle getting played on country radio in the male-dominated field) appeared on looking like a sort of brunette version of the country queen Dolly Parton. It was campy, sleek, over-the-top, beautiful and fun. It’s different from the kind of simplified, lived-in, I-just-stepped-off-a-plane (literally) offstage ensembles Beyoncé has been wearing this year.About a month before the cowboy hat emoji was released in 2016, Beyoncé “went country” for the first time with “Daddy Lessons.” In the video she kept it simple: a white tank top and jeans, a variation on the same kind of look she wore in the opening moments of “Crazy in Love.” For Beyoncé, the use of country is neither a reinvention nor a recalibration. The last decade of Beyoncé’s music career can be defined by an ability to synthesize new, unexplored layers of her identity while remaining the Beyoncé we always loved. The golden era of Beyoncé’s artistry is also defined by her withdrawal from the access she’d given since she was 16. What she says now is almost entirely through her art: She’s a mother and a feminist (, 2013); she’s a Black woman dealing with love (, 2016); she’s Uncle Johnny’s niece (, 2022); she’s a cowboy at heart (, 2024). None of this is new information, but it feels new by the gravity of her intention.

The Pharrell-designed Louis Vuitton collection Beyoncé wore in order to tease her new country album was grown from seeds Virgil Abhloh planted at the same brand in FW21. His show came with an introductory video and an essay. It combined African prints and Western hats, military jackets and wearable skylines. He wrote in his notes, “Provenance is reality; ownership is myth. In the same way we cannot control our inspirations, we cannot trade-mark natural or cultural heritage as contemporary artistic territory.” He was talking about the appropriation of Black art forms but it applies to Louis Vuitton’s FW24 collection as well, where Dakota and Lakota Nation artists collaborated to create bags, blankets, and scarves that celebrated work and their heritage, their way. The image of a cowboy often neglects that it only existed through taken ancestral, Native land as an American “frontier.”For the stage or in a video, Beyoncé seems poised to pull the celebrated Mugler SS92 red rhinestone-cowgirl bodysuit, plus chaps and hat as modeled by Connie Fleming, a trans woman of color. The casting in itself was a subversion of expectation of who is, or can be a cowgirl. On the cover, Beyoncé opted for something simpler (by comparison only): a red-white-and-blue latex bodysuit and chaps by Busted Brand and a matching white hat and boots by Paris Texas. She’s an apparition of a rodeo queen, the emblem of Western femininity whose appearance signals the start of a new rodeo, sitting impossibly on a white horse. She holds the reins in one hand. In the other is a symbol of freedom and liberation to some, colonization and oppression to others: the American flag. The stars which represent the unity of the 50 states are cropped off. The horse is off the ground. Altogether the image has the feeling of depicting the moon landing, perhaps the pinnacle of America’s belief that there ever was a frontier. Yet she’s not telling us we should invade the moon, nor is she arguing to strike up the band on behalf of an America she’s undermined several times before. Beyoncé, it seems, is striking up her band in spite of America and what they have said she could do, be, or sing.

While Western fashion may be having yet another moment, what seems most crucial is to engage with it your way. Perhaps you just got tired of your ongoing Y2K-hole and need another way to style low-rise jeans. Maybe the antidote to too much diaphanous disco is to listen to something rooted in the earth. In the meantime we can look to Beyoncé for some guiding light. In her alternative album cover, she is the Statue of Liberty, nude but for a sash. Replacing her torch is a lit cigar; enlightenment is out, being your own authority is in. And isn’t that what being a cowboy is all about?