By Lacey Szczepanik
Since starting Miss Cowboy, people have told me more than once that I picked the right time to start a Western brand. Western is having a resurgence. We caught the wave at the right moment.
And I understand why. Over the past several years, the West has been showing up in unexpected places. Cowboy boots and big belt buckles in fashion campaigns. Western aesthetics filling Pinterest boards. Western influences showing up in music well beyond country. And at this point, if your latest launch doesn’t have a horse in it, did you even launch? Personally, I’m here for it. I happen to think horses make everything better.
But if you own a Western brand, there’s another side to that observation. If this is a wave, eventually it crashes. If Western is a trend, eventually the trend ends. So what happens then?
I’ve thought about that a lot. And the more I have, the more I think we’re looking at it backwards.
The West isn’t a trend.
Something happened in the post-covid era that goes beyond cowboy boots becoming fashionable again. People became more interested in land and space, self-sufficiency, outdoor life, knowing where their food comes from, gardening, horses, camping, small towns, slower living. Not everyone moved to the country, obviously. But culturally, there has been a pull toward things that feel physical and real after an increasingly digital existence.
It makes sense that Western style would find new relevance alongside that.
But new relevance isn’t the same thing as being new.
Very few American clothing traditions have remained both functional and fashionable for 150 years.
Think about the pieces we associate most with the West. Denim was originally workwear, adopted by the people doing the hard physical work of building and working the West, including cowboys and ranch hands. Cowboy boots were shaped around life on horseback: a heel to help keep your foot in the stirrup, a ledge for your spur to rest on, and a tall shaft to protect the lower leg. Cowboy hats were made for long days outside in the sun. All three still do what they were made to do.
But usefulness alone doesn't explain why they became iconic. Somewhere along the way, they came to represent something beyond their original function: independence, freedom, grit, self-reliance. A cowboy hat is no longer just protection from the sun, just as a pair of cowboy boots is no longer simply something to ride in. They carry the mythology of the West with them.
Even the clothes themselves tell a particularly American story. The broad-brimmed sombreros worn by Mexican vaqueros were predecessors to the American cowboy hat. Turquoise and silver jewelry, beadwork and fringed buckskin associated with Indigenous peoples became part of the visual language of the West. European riding traditions and American workwear brought still more influences. Clothing was borrowed, adapted to the work and the landscape, and passed back and forth. Later, ranch culture, rodeo, Hollywood and music added their own layers. Over generations, all of it became something distinctly recognizable as Western.
That may be one of the most American things about Western clothing. It is a melting pot itself. In a country built from different cultures meeting and influencing one another, maybe it makes sense that one of our most recognizable ways of dressing developed the same way.
When I look at Western images across decades, what I notice is how little the clothes themselves change. Great-fitting jeans, a worn-in cowboy boot, a button-down shirt and a well-shaped felt hat. Those pieces could easily have become relics of another era, yet they move through generations remarkably intact. What changes much more is the world around them. Every decade, mainstream fashion picks them up and styles them through the lens of whatever is happening at the time before eventually shifting its focus somewhere else. Western keeps evolving too, but at its own pace.
Western can be rugged or polished, traditional or modern, practical or high fashion, and somehow we still recognize it. It has a rare ability to absorb the present without surrendering its identity.
And that's what we're seeing now: another interpretation for another moment.
We aren't inventing Western style. We're interpreting it through the lives we live today. Maybe our version of Western looks slightly less rodeo and slightly more outdoors. Maybe it's cowboy boots with running shorts, barn jackets with leggings, technical fabrics worn alongside heritage pieces.
That's the part that excites me most: thinking about what Western clothing looks like for women living now. Clothes that acknowledge where they came from without pretending we live exactly as women did a hundred years ago. A woman might spend her morning at the ranch and the rest of her day working, raising kids, running errands, exercising, meeting friends for a drink, or doing some combination of it all. Her life moves between worlds that women a hundred years ago couldn’t have imagined. Her wardrobe needs to be able to move with her, carrying forward what has always worked about Western clothing while adapting to the way women live now.
Western life and Western wear will continue evolving with the people who live it. And as more people cross paths with the West, more will find something in it that speaks to them and make it part of their own lives. But the West has never needed to follow anyone else's direction. It has always made its own way.