Riding the Wave: Cowboy Carter, American Western Fashion, and the Rise of a New Frontier Mindset

For the past few weeks, I've been pondering the impact of Cowboy Carter’s album visuals. Like many others, I am intrigued by how this album has brought the fashion world's growing fascination with cowboy and vaquero styles to a peak.

According to the Instagram account @databutmakeitfashion, mentions of double denim surged by 14% on April 1st following Cowboy Carter's release on March 29th, 2024. (Source: @databutmakeitfashion) This surge isn't isolated; Western fashion's popularity has been steadily rising over the past two years, paralleling the growing interest in country music, which saw an increase of 20 billion streams, a 24% year-over-year spike, from 2022 to 2023, according to research firm Luminate. (Source: Inside Radio)

Western-style boot sales increased by more than 20% the week after Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” was released, according to market research firm Circana (Source: CNBC), and foot traffic at Levi’s stores also rose by 20 per cent that week compared to the past three years. (Source: WWD)

I'm particularly interested in this growing movement in which American Western culture — including music, film, and sartorial codes — is being re-imagined in our cultural context and what this movement says about our collective mindsets.

Here are my thoughts:

1. Cowboy fashion embodies an anti-urban sentiment.

In the post-pandemic world, urban workers continue to seek versatile, technical attire suitable for various activities and settings, bridging the gap between work, leisure, city, and country life. This shift towards functional attire, which is streetwear but also workwear and leisurewear, is evident in the success of brands like Arc’teryx, whose sales soared to over ￡630m ($800m) in the past year, culminating in a ￡1.08bn ($1.37bn) US IPO in February 2024. (Source: Retail Gazette)

There is a growing collective demand for equally adaptable, functional, and stylish clothing.

Even those who've forsaken corporate life or urban centers due to rising living costs seek attire reflective of their new lifestyles, often immersed in nature, rejecting reminders of their former urban existence, and embracing a new philosophy of life. Western boots, denim, and outdoor workwear exude practicality and boldness, offering a stark contrast to urban minimalism.

Thus, cowboy fashion emerges as the antidote to urban and office wear.

2. A New Frontier Mindset

Beyoncé’s album is part of a movement to reclaim cowboy aesthetics and identities to represent diverse communities, including Black, Hispanic, feminine, and LGBTQI+ groups, often excluded from our understanding of what constitutes a cowboy.

This reclamation, particularly of the Hispanic cowboy or vaquero identity, was already underway, with artists like Bad Bunny sporting vaquero fashion since 2023, even using the coded visuals for the cover of his latest album ‘Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Ma?ana’.

Bad Bunny's October 2023 Adidas collaboration on the Response CL "Paso Fino" sneaker also celebrated a “Western universe, ‘El Paso Fino,’ referring to the unique, elegant, and confident walk, towards the unknown.” (Source: Remezcla)

Delving deeper, what resonates about the cowboy and American Western culture for these diverse groups at this historical juncture?

Between the ‘vibecession’, the increasing polarization of political ideologies, the war in Ukraine, the Israel-Gaza conflict, looming environmental disaster, and the existential questions brought about by rapidly advancing technologies such as AI, it is safe to say we are living in an increasingly unstable reality, and many are worried or despair for the future. For example, an NBC poll from 2023 found a record low share of US voters — just 19% — said they feel confident that their children’s lives will be better than their own generation. (Source: NBC) A 2023 Gallup poll showed that only 5% of Gen Z’s trust the US Supreme Court “a great deal”. This sentiment is only 3% for the presidency, the news, and Congress. (Source: Gallup)

How does this relate to the growing appeal of American Western culture? If we look at historian Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis, he posits that the frontier experience fostered a uniquely American sense of liberty, contrasting with Europe's feudal mindset. It dismantled old customs and empowered pioneers with self-sufficiency, pragmatism, and discipline in order to ‘find their true selves’.

In this way, the fears and disillusionment about our current reality are fueling a desire to escape in numerous ways, one of which is to embrace individualism and abandon the system. The increasing appeal of cowboy fashion, country music, Musica Mexicana, and American Western films and TV, therefore, symbolizes (at least in the West) this desire to break free and ‘manifest’ a new destiny on new frontiers.

To be clear, I am not glamorizing or covering up the racist history of the original ‘Frontier Thesis’ in oppressing Native and African Americans. As a new ‘frontier’ mindset takes hold, it is more important than ever to confront and educate ourselves about past atrocities such as occupation, oppression, and genocide.

Yet, at its core, the Cowboy fashion trend reflects a yearning to leave behind a crumbling system and chart a new path, relying on tenacity, grit, imagination, and indomitable will.

This movement towards hyper-individualism is concerning politically, environmentally, and economically, but that is an analysis for another time.

Considering cultural domains, it will be interesting to see how this mindset will manifest and evolve beyond fashion into design, travel, and other lifestyle domains.