The craftsmen for Back at the Ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have been making cowboy boots for 3 generations. Since Wendy Lane Henry based the model in 1990, the boots have barely modified — however lately, enterprise has exploded. Her waitlist for customized orders is as much as eight months, and she or he’s boosted retailer stock by greater than 40 % to fulfill demand.
“Everyone is infatuated with the West, the free-spirited lifestyle, the wide-open spaces,” Henry says. “Last year was my best year ever, and this year will be better.”
Cowboy boots are the most recognizable American contribution to international vogue, the hallmark of Western type. They’re symbolic of every little thing the cowboy represents in US tradition: freedom, independence, self-reliance, self-assurance. And they’re in every single place proper now, seen in Texas, Paris, New York and on southern sorority rush TikTook. In October supermodels Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner graced the cowl of Vogue in a Wyoming cowboy-themed unfold.
Although cowboy boots have been ascendant for years — since Yellowstone and the pandemic collided to create a Wild West nostalgia cocktail few might resist — the 2025 boot increase isn’t any coincidence. Western type foams to the prime of US popular culture in occasions of political unrest and nationwide soul-searching. Americans turned to the cowboy in the wake of the Civil War, World War II and the Vietnam War. In our post-pandemic disorientation and the first months of Donald Trump’s roller-coaster second time period, Americans are as soon as once more attempting to know who we’re — and who we need to be. What we’ve provide you with, it appears, is cowboys.
“There is a desire to be proud of what and who we are as a country,” says Austin Ripmaster, govt inventive director and vp of name at high-end bootmaker Lucchese. “The cowboy and what Western culture represents is truly, quintessentially America.”
Ripmaster says the development is a part of a broader shift: Boots and cowboy type have advanced “from tropey Western” to easily American. Melissa Collins, chief advertising officer of Western-wear retailer Cavender’s, says cowboy boots resonate as a result of “they carry meaning, tradition and authenticity.” Shares in the cowboy clothing store Boot Barn are up greater than 440 % over the previous 5 years.
To meet a seemingly bottomless pit of demand, bootmakers are quickly scaling up operations. Lucchese has been opening 5 shops per 12 months (it now has 31 areas) to promote boots that price as a lot as $17,000. Venture-capital-backed boot model Tecovas is opening 14 new shops this 12 months and sees alternatives in markets the place cowboy boots haven’t historically been in style: It opened its first New York City location in September.
“If I’m concerned about anything, it’s not demand for the product,” Ripmaster says. “It’s our ability to produce enough pairs.”
Cowboy Lore
The cowboy — at the very least his immortalised Marlboro Man picture — is unbiased, free, hardworking, meritocratic. He’s portrayed as White and historically masculine. He’s tender with animals however harmful to dangerous guys. He’s undeniably cool. In brief, an all-American hero.
Aspects of this narrative are true. Then, as now, being a cowboy was laborious agricultural work. And cowboys have all the time cared about their aesthetic: Even in the Old West, they have been identified to spend a disproportionate quantity of their earnings on boots. But the bother with this cowboy as the totem of American nationwide id is that it’s nearly solely a delusion.
Cowboys could symbolize a libertarian very best of independence and self-reliance right this moment, however in the brutally troublesome American West, there have been no one-man barn raises, no one-man cattle drives. “The reality is there were no individual cowboys, because those people died,” says Richard Slatta, a cowboy historian and former historical past professor at North Carolina State University.
Although the mythological cowboy is usually White, from 1 / 4 to a 3rd of working cowboys have been Black, Hispanic or Indigenous. The phrase “cowboy” itself is partially rooted in slavery: Black and enslaved ranch employees have been referred to as cow “boys,” whereas White ranch employees have been referred to as cowhands. Women have been sidelined in John Wayne Westerns, but in the West they have been usually the breadwinners of cowboy marriages.
Real cowboys weren’t universally beloved, both. In 1882 the Cheyenne Daily Leader described them as “foulmouthed, blasphemous, drunken, lecherous, and utterly corrupt. They are dreaded in towns, for then liquor has an ascendancy over them.”
We have Hollywood and pulp novels to thank for our Clint Eastwood cowboy very best. Hollywood’s dependancy to Westerns common the cowboy into an outsider superman determine, usually an arbiter of extrajudicial justice. He got here into city on horseback. He normally bought the lady. A 1949 Life journal profile of a working cowboy famous: “Hollywood has captured the cowboy’s appearance even if he has missed his spirit.”
Even the thought of the cowboy as distinctly American is inaccurate. Cowboys as an idea are nearly solely imported from cattle operations south of the US border. The boots have been common after these of the Mexican vaqueros (initially from Spain), with heels for holding on to stirrups and metal arches for consolation throughout lengthy days in the saddle. They have tall shafts to guard the wearer from cactus thorns and lethal snakebites. They weren’t made for strolling.
This not-so-American origin story was largely washed away. The Old West was — like the remainder of the nation — a racist, discriminatory place. “The whole culture was essentially imported and then anglicised,” says Slatta. “It was a very purposeful erasure.”
Still, America’s attachment to the cowboy delusion is visceral. In 2023 the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver opened an exhibition teasing aside the legend and actuality of the American cowboy. It started with {a photograph} of a Marlboro Man advert by artist Richard Prince, to acknowledge “the depths to which the myth of the cowboy had supplanted the reality,” says Miranda Lash, a co-curator of the exhibition and now the museum’s chief curator.
The present, which acknowledged the variety of the actual American cowboy — not all White, male or heterosexual — acquired important acclaim. But when “Cowboy” traveled to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas (“Cowtown USA” and the epicenter of American cowboy mythology), it was shuttered after two weeks. When it reopened every week later, it carried a disclaimer that the present was for “mature audiences.”
Says Slatta, who has devoted a lot of his educational profession to parsing the actuality beneath the cowboy story: “At some point I gave up trying to communicate the social reality of the West. … It was clear to me that the myths were winning.”
Ranch Renaissance
Cowboys are likely to turn out to be stylish in the US in occasions of political and social upheaval. After the Civil War, the fractured nation turned its eyes to the West, part of the nation not ravaged by battle (ignoring the violence towards native populations). The area represented a romantic thought of what America might be.
Periods of financial turmoil heighten the cowboy’s attract, as the nation seems inward for solutions. Celebrity showman Buffalo Bill ushered in the first main cowboy renaissance in the late 1800s — a interval of speedy industrialisation, immigration and urbanisation — popularising the romantic very best and vogue of the American West. His fame peaked alongside the monetary Panic of 1893, when a crushing despair hastened the finish of the Gilded Age and introduced a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment.
After World War II, Westerns took over tv: In 1959 and ’60 they accounted for 9 of the 20 highest-rated prime-time packages. In the late ’70s, following many years of painful US engagement in Vietnam, presidential hopeful and former Western movie star Ronald Reagan famously evoked cowboy aesthetics to faucet into nervousness a couple of collective American id. He wore a felt hat and cowboy boots, and he strategically used his ranch as a backdrop to decry the evils of huge authorities, as stagflation eroded religion in Washington.
“At some point I gave up trying to communicate the social reality of the West. … It was clear to me that the myths were winning.”
— Richard Slatta, cowboy historian and former historical past professor at North Carolina State University.
The unbiased, aspirationally masculine maverick quickly dominated popular culture by means of movies similar to Top Gun, The Terminator and the first Rambo film (arguably a Western). And after Sept. 11 there was a marked shift into identifiably American aesthetics. Cowboy type proliferated on vogue runways in 2002 and ’03. “The collections will probably be remembered as the season of the cowboy,” the New Yorker wrote in July 2003, whereas the New York Times dispatch from Milan and London exhibits ran with the headline “Macho America Storms Europe’s Runways.”
Reagan and George W. Bush understood what Hollywood lengthy has: It doesn’t matter that fewer than 2 % of Americans work in agriculture; if you wish to have in style attraction in the US, attain for the cowboy. As technological advances, deindustrialisation and large-scale migration once more grew to become the hallmarks of twenty first century America — with financial shocks that disproportionately affected rural communities and blue-collar employees — that lesson proved prescient.
When Yellowstone premiered in 2018, the soapy, revanchist drama grabbed maintain of the American psyche. But it was the pandemic and the nation’s rising discontents that despatched its viewership hovering. Once once more the US discovered itself looking for a means ahead and got here up with cowboys.
Sexy and escapist, the present highlights a wilder, much less digital lifestyle that appeals to a perpetually plugged-in inhabitants, whereas its recognition amongst conservatives carries a political subtext, a response to the feeling that America has drifted from its “traditional” rural values.
“There is no myth of the West. … We know it’s hard work, and we know it’s self-reliance, and we know that it’s depending on your neighbours and your neighbours depending upon you,” Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan stated in an acceptance speech at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in 2022. He stated he hoped his exhibits “would allow some of this to make its way into a place where that doesn’t exist — in other words, in the cities.”
Sheridan added: “Since we’re selling Stetsons in Los Angeles, I guess we’re doing it.”
Cowboy Diplomacy
Theodore Roosevelt helped assemble the cowboy delusion right into a potent political instrument, however Reagan set the excessive watermark for contemporary politicians evoking the cowboy ethos. Promising to revive American delight and energy to a divided nation, he spoke in nearly legendary Western phrases about “getting the government off your backs.”
The cowboy has since turn out to be a handy shorthand for ascendant conservative ideologies that exalt particular person motion and reject authorities constraints. “The idea is that’s what makes a good society — that if individuals are left to their own designs, they will prosper,” Slatta says. “It’s a great reading of the cowboy myth. It’s a terrible reading of their social reality.”
History suggests cowboys have been all about collective motion. In 1883 they tried to unionise towards rich ranch bosses, hanging in Texas for higher pay and dealing circumstances — a motion that was in the end crushed. Less than a decade later, cowboys have been folded into the rural coalition of the short-lived Populist Party, which sought to unite farmers, ranch fingers and different poorer communities in the South and West.
“The idea of the cowboy relates strongly to populism” and the notion “that the people are the moral good in society,” says Kristin Lunz Trujillo, an assistant professor of political science at Boston College who specialises in rural communities. When “a lot of people feel disconnected from those institutions that have power in society,” she says, “cowboy culture provides an alternative.”
But the definition of populism has advanced over time. Where the Populists of the Nineties careworn solidarity and financial justice, fashionable conservative populism exalts the particular person towards elites and authorities. (How “the elites” are outlined is a transferring goal.) In that shift the proper has targeted on perceived threats to symbols of freedom and self-reliance.
And for nearly so long as there have been cowboys, there’s been concern of their extinction. In the late 1800s the cowboy delusion seized the American creativeness simply as the actual cowboy was changing into much less important, sidelined by applied sciences similar to trains that would transfer cattle extra effectively from ranches to slaughterhouses. Since then the archetype has had a darker edge: that the cowboy, and all he represents, is perpetually below risk from the relentless march of progress.
The Life journal profile from 1949 warned of cowboys being changed by “feebler men” who labored much less, fared worse with ladies, lacked cash and demanded greater pay for fewer expertise. Today the tantalising cowboy dream is again at one other second when conventional masculinity is ascendant, and nostalgia for an imagined America is animating the political get together in energy. Donald Trump Jr., born and raised in Manhattan, has labored laborious to align himself with rural mythologies — proper right down to his American-flag-inlaid cowboy boots.
Boots on the Ground
In 2025 the cowboy boot carries all that historical past right into a deeply divided America. Political polarisation “creates a desire for there to be some sort of unifying [symbol], some sort of redemption,” Trujillo says. For conservatives, cowboy aesthetics supply an “idealised nostalgia, a validation of their values and lifestyle choices.” For others, carrying cowboy boots is an overt act of reclaiming the cowboy as Black, Indigenous, feminine or queer — identities current in the Old West however erased from its delusion.
Beyoncé’s genre-defying Cowboy Carter album and tour took specific purpose at the exclusionary, whitewashed cowboy mythology and the nation music institution that adheres to it. Bootmakers credit score her for fueling a surge in gross sales, as Western type attracts in a extra racially and geographically numerous base. Gay pop star and Missouri native Chappell Roan launched a banjo-laden nation single about lesbian need and sometimes performs in cowboy drag. Country artist Shaboozey, a Nigerian American from Virginia who dons cowboy gear, final 12 months tied the file for the longest-running No. 1 music on the Billboard Hot 100 — a milestone first set in 2019 by Black homosexual cowboy pioneer Lil Nas X.
“Even though these looks and styles are coded in parts of society, or are seen as reactionary, there are lots of communities proudly taking ownership and offering an alternative narrative,” says Sonya Abrego, a vogue historian specialising in twentieth century American type and Western put on. “They are not letting MAGA style claim this.”
Perhaps that’s the final energy of the American cowboy: He might be something you need. “The cowboy is so stretchable and malleable, because it’s so deeply ingrained in the idea of individualism,” says Lash, the curator at MCA Denver. What seems like a unifying aesthetic isn’t, Abrego notes, “because people are coming at it from so many different approaches.” For some Americans, the cowboy is a callback; for others, a provocation or a reclamation. And then there’s the huge center — most individuals — who don’t actually care about what the cowboy represents. They simply suppose the boots look cute.
As the cowboy development spreads, meaninglessness could also be precisely the place it’s headed. “The more you see things, the more they become neutral symbols,” Abrego says. The cowboy boot isn’t any totally different, “and maybe that’s the best place for it.”
By Madison Derbyshire