So Brokeback Mountain did not win the All-Around Champion award at the Oscar rodeo after all, despite odds in its favor. Its upset 11 days ago is the stuff of cowboy legend, if not quite the Alamo. But the movie can lay claim to an achievement that no other film of last year can. With its representation of two plain cowboys who fell in love in plain old Western wear, it hit the fashion bull's-eye. Cowboy boots, snap-button shirts and big ol' belt buckles -- standards that have come and gone several times before -- are striding back into style.
In New York, Ralph Lauren has opened two stores devoted to RRL, his line of clothes with a vintage Western feel; Los Angeles is next. At Rockmount Ranch Wear, the venerable Denver retailer, sales of Western shirts are up 25 percent in the last year. On eBay, Western hats, belt buckles and shirts are up 25 percent in the last month alone. The latest collaboration between a hot fashion designer and an old-school brand is Marc Jacobs and Wrangler.
The Dsquared spring collection, a nostalgic cowboy roundup (complete with leather aprons for shoeing your horse), has been one of the season's best sellers at stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman.
"The cowboy is the guy version of blonde," said Dan Caten, a designer of the line. "It's a classic icon of manliness. All guys relate to it."
But do they? The latest return of cowboy style is hardly a craze like that ignited by Urban Cowboy in 1980 and tromped into the dust thereafter. Unlike the showy finery of a quarter century ago, which eventually brought Western wear low, today's looks exude a laconic Gary Cooper restraint.
This subdued style underscores the ambivalence many men, straight and gay, feel for cowboy style. These are the most masculine of clothes, but with the twist of a bandanna and a too-big buckle, they can veer easily into dude wear. Men itching to indulge in a bit of cowboy find themselves both attracted and torn. There is the romance of the Old West, sure. But they are also faced with two modern-day maverick extremes, which are hard to reconcile. On one side is a president fond of Texas-size belt buckles and a penchant for news conferences in the Texas chaparral. On the other, a pair of gay cowboys who rode off with every film honor. Almost.
When you unravel the history of cowboys and their clothes, the 150-year tug of war over who's a cowboy and who's a dude, as department-store cowboys are still derisively called, gets tangled. The Wild West may be the place where branding was born, but if the last 150 years have made anything clear, it is that no one has staked a clear copyright claim on cowboy style.
"That tension goes way, way back to the 19th century, and words like `dude,' `tenderfoot,' `greenhorn,'" said Lauren Wilson, a professor of textiles at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a clothing historian who specializes in cowboy gear. "All those terms clearly illustrate that tension. Westerners often look with derision at places like Cody, Wyoming, where Easterners buy all the accouterments and spend a lot of money doing it."
The fashion for wearing Western shirts untucked drives her clear around the bend. "That's not a Western look at all," Wilson said. "No self-respecting cowboy would ever wear his shirt like that."
In the 1920s and 1930s fantasy and reality collided with the boom of the dude ranch, where rich Easterners would get "duded up" in expensive Western gear and be squired around by dude wranglers, out-of-work riders often none too thrilled to play-act a scripted role. That faceoff was brought to cinematic life in Westworld (1973), in which robot gunslingers led by Yul Brynner go haywire at a Wild West resort and kill off the tourists. (The idea was so good that Michael Crichton, the script's author, rewrote it into Jurassic Park. A Westworld remake is in development.)
In Urban Cowboy, John Travolta as Bud Davis laid the question of authenticity to rest, with perfect vagueness. When Debra Winger as Sissy gets up the gumption to introduce herself, asking, "Are you a real cowboy?" he shoots back, "Well, that depends on what you think a real cowboy is."
That movie sparked a national vogue for fancy Western shirts and designer jeans, like supertight Sergio Valentes with the back-pocket logo of a longhorn steer. In cities across the country, Western-theme shops flourished, then went toes up as the decade wore on. Even a brief uptick in the early 90s from the fad for country western dancing did not save them.
"I think the 80s did a lot of damage to Western wear," said Marit Allen, the costume designer of Brokeback Mountain. "The clothes went very flamboyant. They really lost the essence of it."
Allen used shirts from Rockmount, which pioneered snap-front shirts and saw-tooth-style pockets in the late 1940s, and is one of the last 19th-century Western-wear companies still in operation. Today Rockmount does a much bigger business in relaxed-fit shirts for cowboys riding the range in a Tahoe. Allen took slim-fit shirts from the company's new vintage-design collection and further tailored them to fit Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Two of the shirts, one a muted plaid, the other denim, ended up as the symbol of their ill-starred romance and sold last month on eBay for US$101,100.51.
Western wear has long been a marriage of archetypes, having come into being as a cross-pollination of the functional clothing taken to Texas by settlers in the 1820s and 1830s and the more exuberant and ornamented style of the Spanish and Mexican ranchers there. Over time the new arrivals appropriated silver conchas and chaps and, courtesy of John Stetson, modified the sombrero into the familiar cowboy hat.
By the late 19th-century, travel writers, struck by the novel dress of ranch hands, propagated the mythology of the cowboy as a modern knight, vigilant, independent, fearless. But modern scholarship confirms that most cowboys were no more strangers to style than modern bachelors are, frequently buying new clothes and fancy tooled boots when flush with money at the end of a trail drive.
Wilson published a study in 1991 comparing posed and unposed photos of cowboys from that time. She found that in posed pictures young men would wear full cowboy regalia, to give to a sweetheart or to send back East to the family, but unposed pictures told a story of clothes stripped down to essential work gear.
"So there's a cowboy look that is stereotypical, and a real cowboy look that's not stereotypical," Wilson said.
The historian David Dary, the author of Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries (University of Kansas Press, 1989), agreed. His book details the interaction between cowboys and commerce stretching back to the teens and 20s of the last century, which was the heyday of Tom Mix and early cowboy silents.
"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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