Catherine Kwon

A cowboy marquee casts neon hues of red and blue onto my friends and me. We departed our rural, East Texas town two hours ago, ditching ranches of real cowboys, for a club called the Electric Cowboy, one of five in a franchise of cowboy-themed clubs. The music in the club is a distant cousin to the music on the country radio that plays constantly in our John Deere tractor while we bale hay. Girls in blue-jean shorts and low cut, white tops seductively serve lemon drop martinis and champagne to tables in private sections. We look around shocked, the club is supposed to be a recreation of our world, but it’s drenched in glitter. 

The clubgoers wear workwear and denim that we usually see muddied and frayed from ranch work. But under the fractured light of the disco ball, the clothes are embellished with rhinestones, patches, jewels – all glamorous customizations that real cowboys would never wear. The male patrons wear El Presidente Stetson hats and Canadian tuxedos — denim on denim — from Ralph Lauren. The women, dressed in similar luxury, wear pink calfskin boots, which glimmer with gemstones. Turquoise and silver decorate their ears, necks and wrists. Vintage Japanese selvage from Madison Avenue boutiques, the finest leather goods made from animals that don’t even live in Texas and the intoxicating smell of Tom Ford and DS and Durga cologne converge.

The men, heads lifted high, and thumbs tucked into belt loops, gaze at the women, searching for flaws and pleasurable features. Women match the color of their lips to their boots, and voluptuous curls frame their faces. Denim corsets paired with cinched belts accentuate their figures. Femininity and masculinity mingle, adorned in a consumerist abstraction of the cowboy. 

Our Sunday sermons and dirt road parties in my rural Texas town never see this kind of moneyed scheme; where I am from, things are much more modest. The older generations, like my grandparents, wonder why Acne Studios denim jeans — intentionally frayed and muddied — are $800. In my town, frayed denim belongs to the deepest parts of the farm and represents the dignified profession of those who cultivate the land. This distinction doesn’t exist in the Electric Cowboy. 

The public’s view of rural life has evolved a lot since society initially moved away from rural lifestyles into the urban. A different version of rural life recently resurged into popular culture, allowing for this rural chic to become a status symbol worn by celebrities like Kanye, Miley Cyrus and Lil Nas X. Maybe it is nostalgia for a bygone time or maybe it is a fleeting trend that will fade with the next surge of culture. The practitioners of this aesthetic idealize things like Marlboro cigarettes, beer and dark liquors, turquoise and feather jewelry, fringes, cowhide, “vintage” jeans and pop country crossover artists like Morgan Wallen and Beyonce, with their albums “One Thing at a Time” and “Cowboy Carter.”

Having grown up living and working on a farm, upon leaving and going to places like urban mega-churches, the NorthPark Mall in Dallas and the Electric Cowboy, I began to realize the fetishizers don’t understand the reality of what they are replicating. Yes, the rural Texans wear boots and jeans, and they let Marlboro cigarette smoke curl up from lips soaked with canned Busch light. But there is also cow shit caked onto their boots and solemn stories told of our neighbors losing their lives in a hay baler or to a rowdy cow. Disease riddles the bodies of farmers, with maladies entering from every angle. Long days in the sun cause cancerous carcinoma on the skin, and health issues rage on in lungs and livers as farmers partake in destructive vices to escape the realities of the economic frustration that comes with farming.

On the other side of this economic spectrum, stores like Tecovas, known for selling “Western-style” apparel, sell pairs of thousand-dollar leather boots that will never see a herd of cattle off to the slaughter. Corporations, like Ticketmaster, spike the prices of tickets to over fourteen hundred dollars to see “country” singers, like Dan and Shay, who sing of lives that ticket purchasers will never experience. They are commodifying rural life, making a glamorized mockery of farmers and cowboys, whether they do it intentionally or not.

The rich folks in their stylized rural garb come in many different forms: Dallasites dressed in their expensive cowboy clothes attending mega-churches to bolster their patriotism with a Sunday morning service; Californian movie stars and socialites coming in with their high salaries and $3,600 Van Cleef and Arpels turquoise jewelry, buying reclaimed swaths of land that used to be the source of a family’s livelihood; or couples donating thousands of dollars to the Republican Party while sporting MAGA hats in a brand new $100,000 pickup truck with wives clutching calfskin purses. All of these are manifestations of the aesthetic that depart from the modest lives of the true cowboy. While off base, this aesthetic is an attempt at replicating the attributes of a cowboy to replicate something of a greater cultural significance. 

The widest reaching and most memorable fashion senses usually aim to embody an ideal. The ’90s grunge fashion, with its loose flannels and Doc Martin boots, idealized the tolerance of difference and cynicism towards big corporations; the 70s punk fashion, with its leather jackets and spiked hair, idealized the movement of anti-establishment against political systems; and the 60s hippie fashion, with their psychedelic colors and long hair, idealized freedom, love, and nonviolence. This romanticizing of the modern rural Texan strives to embody something similarly meaningful. The early farmer in America was a genuine manifestation of the American dream. The fashion sense idealizes the patriotism, conquest and the rurality that dominated this early American life. 

But, it’s also true that patriotism can be ugly. Idealization of a “patriotic” ideal is frequently permeated with meanings that subsequently make a mockery of what the founding fathers’ mythologized patriotism to be. This fashionable sense seemingly attempts to capture the “patriotism” of the cowboys of rural Texas, who are known for being neighborly, kind and loyal. However, it is often worn by a certain population, who possess hateful ideologies, which can diminish the image of our noble cowboys into hateful bigots. Maybe in dressing like this, those who embrace the aesthetic are chasing feelings of nostalgia for a bygone time, looking for a connection to their Americanness.

If there is something that is purely American, it is rural American life. I understand why the people in these clubs, churches and concerts want to replicate and glamorize it. If I am being honest, I am drawn to it as well — to the mythologized version of it. This sign of pride in the place you come from is one of the grandest hallmarks of Americanness. Perhaps, beneath the fancy leather boots and cowhide vests, maybe all the practitioners of the aesthetic are looking for, is a connection to this fundamental principle of being American. ​​The mythologized version of rural life possesses something noble that fortifies core ideas of Americanness — self-determination, pride and hard work.

So now, when my friends call me and ask me if I want to go to the Electric Cowboy, despite some of the ignorance behind the aesthetic, the answer is always yes. I button up my vintage Ralph Lauren denim shirt and place my fanciest cowboy hat on my head to drive into Dallas. I walk into the club to be met with dozens of bodies similarly dressed, wearing every variation of the core garb of the modern cowboys. I get lost in the pop song disguised as a country anthem, and I realize that I do not possess the vitriolic patriotism that permeates some of our culture, but nonetheless I am proud of where I come from. I give into the feeling, joining my friends in the line dances that rose to fame on TikTok. Maybe in sharing the dance floor with the other clubgoers, some of the dirt from my boots will make its way to theirs.