From the Stetson-wearing dancers who accompanied Ryan Gosling during his Oscars performance to Beyoncé’s forthcoming Cowboy Carter country era, the Wild West aesthetic is back at the center of pop culture.
Ahead of the Grammys in February, Lana Del Rey announced that she’s going country for her next album. Days later during the Super Bowl, Beyoncé released two country singles — one of which, “Texas Hold ‘Em,” immediately topped the Billboard Hot 100. Her new album, Cowboy Carter, comes out March 29.
Two major pop music acts going country had an immediate impact on trends. According to data from fashion retailer Boohoo, Google searches for “cowboy hat” increased 212.5% following Beyoncé’s Super Bowl announcement and searches for “bolo tie” exploded by 566%.
Since then, cowboy style has popped up all over, from fashion to music to wedding themes. Model and trendsetter Bella Hadid has been spotted at rodeos supporting her equestrian boyfriend Adan Banuelos in cowboy hats and on the street in boot-cut jeans. Ryan Gosling and a chorus of “Kens” donned Stetsons to perform a song from Barbie at the Oscars, a reference to the cowboy outfits Barbie and Ken wear when first venturing outside of Barbieland. As Louis Vuitton’s new creative director of menswear, Pharrell Williams released a January 2024 collection that paid tribute to Black and Indigenous cowboy fashion.
Chances are, you might still have some Western apparel available from 2023’s . Or maybe 2019’s “yeehaw” moment resonated more with you through Balenciaga’s mega-popular cowboy boots, the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 or the mainstream popularity of country artists like Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris.
The classic hat, boots and rugged workwear elements may surge in popularity from year to year, but the style never fully goes away. Cowboy culture is quintessentially American — it represents a time of freedom and self-reliance that is easy to yearn for in such a digitally connected age.
From the real-life horse wranglers of the late 1800s to the characters in many John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies in the mid-20th century, blazing a trail in the American West isn’t just culturally fascinating — it’s visually compelling.
As trends resurge in the social media era, those typically left out of the original ultra-masculine, vastly white cowboy narratives get to try their hands by wearing these timeless styles. Historians estimate that one in four cowboys in the American West was Black, and cowboy style was influenced heavily by Mexican vaqueros, but people of color rarely appeared as cowboys in pop culture depictions of the period. The impact of Black country music artists has long been ignored, too, according to experts.
Beyoncé’s mom, Tina Knowles, wrote on Instagram that she “always celebrated cowboy culture growing up” in Texas, attending rodeos and sporting Western fashion.
“We also always understood that it was not just about it belonging to White culture only,” she said. “In Texas there is a huge Black cowboy culture.”
