Fashion Goes West –Part 2

Published: March 9, 2006

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That movie sparked a national vogue for fancy Western shirts and designer jeans, like supertight Sergio Valentes with the back-pocket logo of a longhorn steer. In cities across the country, Western-theme shops flourished, then went toes up as the decade wore on. Even a brief uptick in the early 90's from the fad for country western dancing did not save them.

"I think the 80's did a lot of damage to Western wear," said Marit Allen, the costume designer of "Brokeback Mountain." "The clothes went very flamboyant. They really lost the essence of it, which is in that trim, tight fit. If you think of Steve McQueen in the 60's in his Western wear,he was very lean and mean. The shirts had become very blousy,and there shouldn't be anything blousy about it."

Ms. Allen used shirts from Rockmount, which pioneered snap-front shirts and saw-tooth-style pockets in the late 1940's, and is one of the last 19th-century Western-wear companies still in operation.Today Rockmount does a much bigger business in relaxed-fit shirts for cowboys riding the range in a Tahoe. Ms. Allen took slim-fit shirts from the company's new vintage-design collection and further tailored them to fit Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.Two of the shirts, one a muted plaid, the other denim, ended up as the symbol of their ill-starred romance and sold last month on eBay for $101,100.51.

Western wear has long been a marriage of archetypes, having come into being as a cross-pollination of the functional clothing taken to Texas by settlers in the 1820's and 30's and the more exuberant and ornamented style of the Spanish and Mexican ranchers there. Over time the new arrivals appropriated silver conchas and chaps and, courtesy of John B. Stetson, modified the sombrero into the familiar cowboy hat.

By the late 19th-century, travel writers, struck by the novel dress of ranchhands, propagated the mythology of the cowboy as a modern knight, vigilant,independent, fearless. But modern scholarship confirms that most cowboys were no more strangers to style than modern bachelors are, frequently buying newclothes and fancy tooled boots when flush with money at the end of a traildrive.

Dr. Wilson published a study in 1991 comparing posed and un posedphotos of cowboys from that time. She found that in posed pictures young men would wear full cowboy regalia, to give to a sweetheart or to send back East to the family, but unposed pictures told a story of clothes stripped down to essential work gear.

"So there's a cowboy look that is stereotypical, and a real cowboy look that's not stereotypical," Dr.Wilson said.

The historian David Dary, the author of"Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries" (University of Kansas Press, 1989), agreed. His book details the interaction between cowboys and commerce stretching back to the teens and 20's 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," Mr. 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.