"The dress was pretty much functional into the early part of the 20th century," Dary said. "Then you had motion pictures arrive, and what happened was that some cowboys began to look at them and say, 'If I am going to be a cowboy, I should wear a hat.' The real cowboys started to emulate the cowboy in the movie.
"There used to be a joke in Texas that you never saw a man in a cowboy hat until he got on a plane to go to New York."
So who's the real thing?
"I'm a fake," said Daniel Fead, a Denver real estate agent who has a fondness for Western wear. He was bitten by it some 10 years ago, when he started going to a local country western dance club.
His taste for the dancing fell away -- "I never could stand the music" -- but he still likes the duds. "I still buy boots, even though I don't need them," Fead said. Generally he waits to wear them until January, when the National Western Stock Show comes to town.
"These guys are the real cowboys, although it is entertainment, and they kind of know what they're pitching," he said. Still, he added: "I am a little jealous of how rugged these guys are. I think our culture has sort of mellowed men out. We're not so rugged anymore."
Caten of Dsquared is not so sure. "It's been romanced forever," he said of cowboy style. "I wasn't thinking of some real cowboy out there ... You know, the cowboy is in our heads."
Italian-born Giuseppe Lignano, an avant-garde architect in Manhattan, looks at Western clothes from a foreigner's perspective, and through that lens the tricky masculinity that is off-putting to American men is not so freighted.
"There is that tension with everything macho," Lignano said. But what he finds appealing is that, "like with everything American, everyone can do it, everyone can wear it."
"I don't know how authentic it is," he said. "But who
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