Ideally the jacket or vest should be made from an Indian blanket or Chimayo rug but the Pendleton blanket alternative is more common and cheaper. SANTA FE ARTISTIC: You wear a jacket or vest with a geometric pattern and silver buttons. IVY LEAGUE WEST: If you are from an Eastern college and do not want to be confused with a local, choose a button-down shirt, tweed jacket, new jeans with a frighteningly pronounced crease and cowboy boots. Over time, however, variations have emerged: All of the above is your basic Western look. It is cheaper to maintain a Rolls-Royce than a horse. Few Western males have one because horses are mostly owned by teenage girls, and their upkeep is the responsibility of their impoverished, but doting, parents. You have to wear it all the time, and should you, God forbid, take it off, remember to put it down, rim up.Īs for accoutrements, bolo ties seem to be optional, and actual horses are unnecessary.
However, if you do wear one, it has to be expensive and black. Fourth, you have to have a big belt and a giant buckle announcing that you won first place in an obscure local rodeo, bullthrowing or maybe hornswoggling. This leads naturally to the third rule, which decrees that your boots must cost an arm and a leg because they are made from ostrich, eel, elephant or snakeskin. The legs must also be way too long and bunch up on your boots so that when you get on your imaginary saddle, your pants won't ride up above your boot tops.
The second rule is you have to wear Wranglers, because the seams that might chafe you on a horse are on the outside of your leg.
The bright colors are so somebody sees you dangling from the mesquite. They say the snaps prevent you from being pulled off your non-existent horse if the shirt gets caught on a branch. The shirt can be plain, plaid, striped or even embroidered - the more garish the better. The first tip is to wear a shirt that has pearl snaps instead of buttons.
#FELT COWBOY HAT MOUNTY CREASES HOW TO#
John Wayne movies notwithstanding, real cowboys decades ago probably sported more dirt and dust than anything we'd care to emulate.ĭespite this, I realize that some guys still want to dress in what they think of as Western style, and there do seem to be some rules about how to do it right. Second, given that 99.9 percent of the men in the West do not qualify as cowboys, a group rapidly disappearing from the West, we should probably not wear cowboy clothes any more. First of all, I am not an expert in how Western women should dress, although after wandering around Denver's annual Great Western Stock Show this winter, the only rule I could see was that whatever a woman wears is supposed to be tight.