Hey, cowboy, who designed that outfit?

[TJ]

A friend sent me a link to this article.  I am going to post the first few paragraphs and you can read the rest online.
If it has already been posted elsewhere, please bear with me and maybe even forgive me, okay?


http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/13/style/fcowboy.php
 
Hey, cowboy, who designed that outfit? 
By David Colman
 
The New York Times

MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006
 


 
So "Brokeback Mountain" did not win the All-Around Champion award at the Oscar rodeo after all, despite odds in its favor. Its upset last week 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 2005 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. Jacobs has gone into the Wrangler archives and reinvented some classic cowboy wear from the late 1940s and early '50s. He also showed western shirts in his own spring collection.
 
And the DSquared spring collection, a nostalgic cowboy roundup, 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, suggesting the authenticity of yesteryear with, say, a quiet vintage-plaid shirt or plain brown boots.
 
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. 

>>>>>Above link to read the rest of the article.

[TJ]

The historian David Dary, the author of "Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries," agreed. His book details the interaction between cowboys and commerce stretching back to the '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 remember seeing an interview with a working cowboy type rancher and the interview mentioned that the man was wearing athletic type shoes instead of cowboy boots.

When he was asked why he did that, he answer was, "So I won't be mistaken for a truck driver."

There is a company which makes Ropers boots which are very expensive. The same company makes what is called "Lace-R-Ropers" which are a working cowboys version of athletic shoes when he is doing a regular job on a ranch or practicing for a rodeo event. While they sort of look like a jogging shoe, they apparently feel like they are actual boots in the way that they fit the foot.