Giving Fashion The Boot
By Jacqueline Lopez
It’s amusing really, how fashion continues to embrace the cowboy boot as a wardrobe staple. An object representing the rugged hard-working American, the ranchero, the cowboy, has now been adopted by the ‘fashion-forward’ city dweller. Paired with tulle skirts, biker shorts, silk dresses, and printed leggings, the cowboy boot has become the necessary item adorning its wearer in the rustic, rugged, and humble characteristics associated with cowboy culture. The modern wearer has most likely never worked, nor even stepped foot, on a ranch before. This recontextualisation of objects to communicate fresh meanings is denoted within fashion academia as bricolage. The full definition ‘the re-ordering and re-contextualization of an object within a total system of significance that already include prior sedimented meanings,’ gives clarity in understanding how subcultures chose to fashion the cowboy boot and install new meaning in the object. There was already a substantial narrative permeated into the leather of the cowboy boot through their inherent bond to performative masculinity on display in numerous western films. Thus one can wonder whether bricolage can truly denounce prior meaning and replace it completely with new significance, or if remaining fragments of the original context are forever embedded in the object's persona.
The most popular example of bricolage is the Punk movement’s adoption of the safety pin. Originally, a tool used primarily within corporate, institutional, and capitalistic systems to join papers is redefined as a form of accessory within punk circles so much so that it became the leading symbol representing the subculture. In this example, the safety pin’s hard aesthetic remains the important signifier throughout its adaptations. Are Cowboy boots, like safety pins, used in a similar way by a plethora of brands in the fashion industry to perpetuate a masculine sense of pride and self-esteem? Or is all signification lost when the object enters the fast fashion wheel and becomes overexposed and just another style of boot following the Chelsea trend.
Fashion insiders refuse for this to be the case, as we all know story-telling and brand imagery is what carries fashion into the future. Many brands adopted the cowboy boot in congruence with pop culture’s romanization of the ‘West’ and the countryside evident in Lil’ Nas X’s song ‘Old Town Road,’ Kanye’s move to Wyoming, or the seemingly never-ending stream of Instagram photos from influencers’ trips to Utah that prompted a collective gaze towards countryside culture. Hopefully, the harmful role of toxic masculinity embedded in traditional western cowboy culture is too re-signified in the shoe’s many new adaptations.
The majority of street style images over the past year have indeed been women strutting the streets cowboy boy - but are these women challenging predisposed notions of which gender should be ‘rugged,’ or simply following their highly paid stylists to pick the season’s trendiest shoe on the shelf?
Luxury brands in particular have produced the highest quality redesigns of the cowboy boot in the ironic fascination with the slower nature of rural living, and sourcing the best leather from authentic local suppliers. Whether we label it imitation or admiration, the adoption and appropriation of culture is inherently problematic, but where does bricolage fit in? While brands run from ‘cultural appropriation’ in fear of the wrath of call out culture, bricolage remains a grey area between honoring historical styles, establishing brand heritage. Much like repeating a word over and over again, or semantic satiation, the mass mainstream adaptation and dissemination of the cowboy boot may leave the historical shoe void of meaning.
Brands continue to create new adaptations of the cowboy boot therefore adapting its meaning. Cowboy fashion continues a shift towards the intersection of masculinity and femininity à la Brokeback Mountain. The boot also represents a clash of high and low culture, worn both by the everyday shopper and international consumers of haute couture.
The cowboy boot is more than just a shoe; it is a developed and well-represented craft that lives on beyond western cinema and the American Southwest, now subverted through the gaze of mainstream fashion.
Illustration by Chloe Walter
