YEEHAW!

Surveying my credit card statement to discern what exactly went wrong last month, I slowly realized how heavily I’ve invested in this being a Cowgirl Summer. Line dancing classes, red cowboy boots, a flight to South Dakota: I might as well short the Coastal Chic stocks and bet it all on belt buckle futures. I wanted to gauge the health of my portfolio (retro western Pinterest board), so I decided to conduct some research in the field.

I asked writer Charlie Squire to ruminate on the aesthetics of the American West and their experience an American abroad in Europe:

American Strangers by Charlie Squire

There is blood on my cowboy boots and there is Adderall in my blood. There is Ornette Coleman in my headphones and an iced coffee in my hands. I am grotesquely, screamingly American, an amalgamation of overplayed tropes wearing oversized sunglasses. Living amongst Europeans for the last three years, I have often attempted to distance myself from my own Americanness and the public contempt it inspires. I have often fashioned myself in the image of a new, internationalist, effete, insufferable cultural class that takes over the galleries and coffee shops of cities like London and Berlin and Toronto and Hong Kong leaving a trail of wine bars and autofiction readings in its wake. I sneer at NYU students on the subway. I read literature in translation on the tram. I drink Rothaus Pils on the bus.

And yet, I remain inevitably, immovably, fundamentally, American. Even my body is American. I am tall, padded with a layer of corn-fed fat, with large feet and even larger breasts that I’d guess are the result of hormones in the skim milk served in public school lunches. Land of the free, home of bovine somatotropin. I feel sexiest in a string bikini top paired with wide, worn-in, perfectly blue jeans, seated by a body of water and listening to Steely Dan. I am an American body.

I love America. That’s not true, but someone in Europe needs to say it to the Europeans who laugh about American healthcare and school shootings and underserved post-Fordist cities and toxic highways. Certainly, I respect Europeans for their lack of hard work — it’s their lack of ambition I can’t stand. And for all the European talk of European globalness, a concept dialectically defined in opposition to supposed American obliviousness, there is a sweeping ignorance into the American condition: its history, its psychology, its human geography. I don’t love America, but I love Americans and the Americana they have built. Americana is a system of images and symbols existentially predicated on the idea that there must be something better out there, something we cannot find but must build, something that gives reason to and relief from the spectacular violence and government malice endemic to our invented state. It’s irrationally optimistic, fatally individualistic, haunted by a past that has never existed in pursuit of a future that will never come. I miss it. I need it, to make sense of the world and to make sense of myself.

I miss watermelon slices in perfect isosceles triangles; Carrie Underwood karaoke; lime-soaked Mexican food; the county fair; ringer tees; old cars with wood paneling on the side; bagels; middle-class midcentury modern houses in Michigan; block parties; late-night diners staffed by single mothers who smoke on their five-minute breaks; kooky cafés with mismatched mugs staffed by alfalfa-eating baby boomers whose COEXIST stickers are peeling off their Toyota Priuses; mailboxes shaped like trout; strawberry shortcake; teenage girls with Piercing Pagoda belly-button rings; Mennonites on the side of the road selling blueberries; walking while eating; re-runs of Cheers on cable television; beautiful and uninhibited women taking shots of vodka infused with made-up flavors; movie theater popcorn doused in the most delicious chemicals science can manufacture; John Cheever and Elizabeth Hardwick and Don DeLillo and Gore Vidal; benign misogynists on early-morning radio; bootcut jeans; tee shirts for the aforementioned diners choppily cropped to expose the aforementioned belly-button rings; fringe suede jackets; union-made baseball caps; and strangers, strangers who listen and ask questions and smile and chit-chat and tell you about their home country or favorite basketball team or elementary teacher wife, beautiful strangers, kind strangers, American strangers.

Some of my fave cowgirl inspired runway looks:

This phenomenal article by Kaitlin Owens on the resurgence of the cowgirl as a cultural icon:

This spring, WWD pulled together a collection of Western-Wear Fashion on the Runway: Photos From the Archives:

This great shot of Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell in Geoffrey Beene dresses by Arthur Elgort for Vogue makes me want to road trip across the South:

This music video for “Miranda” by Reyna Roberts:

Line dancing is back in a BIG WAY:

These Katy Keane paper dolls:

Even though it was a critical and commercial failure, I think Gus Van Sant’s 1993 film adaptation of Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get The Blues is really fun:

And, finally, my personal Cowgirl Summer playlist:

Tell me what you’re listening to for the Summer of ‘24!