As a fashion accessory, the cowboy hat is expanding its frontiers. But its significance is most notable as a symbol of Beyoncé’s latest musical conquest.
A high-quality cowboy hat should travel far and last long, and the 10-gallon topper’s frontier currently extends behind some tightly-managed velvet ropes. Just this year, it has made it to the Oscars, to Paris Fashion Week, and on the cover of Vogue. It has gone all the way to Malibu with Barbie and Ken, and even to the rodeo with Bella, the Hadid sister of the moment, who is dating an actual cowboy. But there is perhaps no more notable or coveted space the cowboy hat has occupied this year than the one atop Beyoncé’s head.
Beyoncé, whose eighth solo album, Cowboy Carter, arrives Friday, has made her Stetson hat the signature of this country-ified era of her career. In February, she first hinted at the new music to come by showing up to the Grammy Awards wearing one in dove white, paired with Western-inflected Louis Vuitton couture and platinum hair. (At the ceremony, Beyoncé sat just behind Dua Lipa—photos of the hat rising like a halo in the background of photos of Lipa bopping along to various parts of the show were appropriately memed.) A week later, she wore a black version to the Super Bowl, the same night she dropped the first two singles from the album: the ballad “16 Carriages” and the line-dance jam “Texas Hold ’Em.” Different versions of the hat have also been featured on the cover art for both singles, and for the album itself.
As the avatar for this moment—built around a highly anticipated album from a superstar whose visuals wield massive influence and are essential to her art—the hat’s cultural caché has been reaffirmed. But on Beyoncé’s head, its appeal also takes on a new dimension as a symbol of the archivist ambitions of Cowboy Carter, reflecting forgotten stories of Black cowboys in American history and remixing the cowboy archetype in the public imagination as the album sets out to do the same for Black artists in country music. It is a work in Beyoncé’s signature as an artist—the ability to blend the personal, the historical, the political and the voguish into one aesthetic story.
By styling herself as a cowboy, Beyoncé is subverting traditional signifiers of Americana, but she’s also tapping into what’s cool. For roughly the last five years, Western wear has been a consistent trend. In 2019, the country-rap remix of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” was the song of the year, and brands like Saint Laurent and Brunello Cucinelli sent denim shirts with pearl snaps and jackets with fringe down runways. If that was to be a blip, the onset of the pandemic, which left millions cloistered inside, dreaming of wide-open spaces (and binging Yellowstone) ensured that it was not. In 2023, according to Business of Fashion, retailers in the U.S. and U.K. introduced an increase of 240 percent more new styles of cowboy boots and denim shirts than they had the year prior. Runways have maintained a Western flair, whether styled by houses like Ralph Lauren that have a history with those clothes or elsewhere. Even prim Chanel has gotten on board. At Celine, Hedi Slimane has been making chaps.
For many who covet this look, the hat is the item with the most appeal. Google searches for “cowboy hat” have risen steadily over the last five years. The New York Times recently ran a feature story about the Western wear store Kemo Sabe, which sells custom hats made of felted beaver or mink for upwards of several hundred dollars out of stores in ritzy ski towns like Aspen, Colorado, and Park City, Utah. To a clientele that doesn’t exactly spend a lot of time baling hay, the brand sells an image reflecting the enduring romance of the West with an experience to match—sales associates are craftsmen who shape brims and crowns by hand and brand initials or designs into felt using copper irons. The headline of the Times piece, thanks to Kemo Sabe’s popularity with influencers, celebrities, and Real Housewives: “The Most Famous Cowboy Hat In The World Right Now.”
Beyoncé, like Shania Twain, Rihanna, and many other A-listers, has bought hats at Kemo Sabe before. But for the Cowboy Carter rollout, she went more traditional, with a Stetson.
John B. Stetson, the founder of the brand, is credited as the cowboy hat’s original inventor. In the 1860s, after receiving bad news about his health, the New Jersey–born hatter took a trip on what he thought would be his only chance to see the American West. When he got there, Stetson noticed the cowboys and frontiersmen he saw wore a mix of impractical hats made from animal skins or straw, and decided to create a new hat that would be more functional. He designed a hat with a wide brim, which protected wearers from the sun, made out of felted fur which was waterproof, durable, and insulating, meaning it stayed cool in the day and warm at night. Original Stetson advertisements also suggested that the crown of the hat could serve as a water bucket for your horse and that the brim could fan the flames of a campfire. Stetson called his design the “Boss of the Plains,” and distributed it to dealers across the country. While the original “Boss of the Plains” hats had flat brims, later versions were turned up at the sides, making them less likely to catch on a lasso being roped overhead.
The Stetson caught on quickly, and the brand’s lore grew in 1912 when the battleship USS Maine was raised from Havana harbor after 14 years underwater and a hat was recovered from the wreck in near-mint condition.
Over time, the Stetson hat has become a core cowboy symbol in popular culture, but also one that reflects a particular vision of what that entails—the white, ruggedly masculine style of the Marlboro Man. The exact hat that Beyoncé wore to the Grammys, a Stetson Shasta 10X, is the same style Ryan Gosling wore for his Academy Awards performance of “I’m Just Ken,” which in Gosling’s case was a nod to the frontiersman aesthetic his character mistakes—or intuits—as symbolic of patriarchy.
It’s this dynamic that makes the cowboy ripe for reinterpretation. Over the last few years, there have been several attempts in popular culture to rewrite Western stories in ways that subvert the typical white, masculine narratives of Davy Crockett or John Wayne. In January, at Paris Fashion Week, Pharrell Williams’s Louis Vuitton collection showcased high-end ranch wear in a collection designed as a story about the original Black cowboys of the West. Two actual cowboys from Oklahoma walked in the show, most models wore hats down the runway, and it was a version of a look from that collection Beyoncé wore with her Stetson at the Grammys.
“I feel like when you see cowboys portrayed, you see only a few versions,” Williams told fashion press in a post-show interview. “You never really get to see what some of the original cowboys really look like. They look like us, they look like me, they look Black, they look Native American.”
Recent movies have had similar objectives. In 2021, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog told the story of a (probably) closeted rancher. That same year, Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall, a showcase of Black outlaws and rough riders full of swagger, was released on Netflix. At this year’s Oscars, Martin Scorsese’s Western crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon received 10 nominations, including the first ever for Best Actress by a Native American in Lily Gladstone.
Antoinette Messam, the costume designer for The Harder They Fall, told me how working on that movie corrected her own understanding of cowboy history.
Messam grew up watching Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western movies in the ‘70s, so her image of a cowboy was Clint Eastwood. But when she dug in to research the film, she learned the history: one in four cowboys in the 19th century was Black, and the word “cowboy” originally only was used to refer to Black men who handled cattle, usually by the white men they worked for.
“The name was derived from the cow hands on these ranches in the West who worked for these owners, and they were called cow boys,” Messam said. “They rounded up the cows, and of course ‘boy’ as we understand it is a term that Black men have been called for generations.”
The cowboy image changed, though, because of media depictions. One of the Black cowboys portrayed in The Harder They Fall, played by Delroy Lindo, is Bass Reeves, who was believed to be the first black U.S. Deputy Marshal west of the Mississippi.
Larry Callies, who runs the Black Cowboy Museum in Rosenberg, Texas, and who was an advisor to the movie, told me that Reeves was the likely inspiration for the Lone Ranger character, who debuted to a mainstream audience through a radio story hour in 1933. The station that aired the program first described the Lone Ranger as Black, Callies said, until white audiences complained.
“When people started calling and saying they wouldn’t listen to the radio station anymore, they said ‘Oh, no. I didn’t say he was Black, I said he wore black,’” Callies said. That backtrack is how the black mask worn by the Lone Ranger entered the picture. By the time the character was featured in TV and film, he was white.
To create the costumes for the characters in The Harder They Fall—for a cast that included Idris Elba, Regina King, and Lakeith Stanfield—Messam sourced a combination of vintage and contemporary clothes. Everything had to look cool. A Victorian-fitted leather jacket on King was paired with dark denim. The men wore a lot of John Varvatos. The costumes had a basis in history, but Messam and Samuel wanted the characters to evoke the same aspirational qualities as the Eastwood-era screen cowboys.
“One of the first things Jeymes said to me when we met was he’s not making a dusty dirty cowboy movie,” Messam said. “And it was really important for him to have color and textures and then the sets be electric. Because he wanted to celebrate his people and not make them look downtrodden, because they weren’t downtrodden, right? They owned these towns and they looked good.”
Beyoncé, who went to the premiere of The Harder They Fall, knows this history. In 2021, she put out a collection of her own fashion line, IVY Park, in collaboration with Adidas, shaped around the heritage of Black Americans on the frontier. The clothes included chaps, wide-leg denim, and a purple and brown cow print motif.
“After understanding where the word ‘cowboy’ came from, I realized how much of the Black, brown and Native cowboy stories are missing in American history,” Beyoncé told the Houston Chronicle at the time. “I am proud to represent Houston culture, my roots and all the people who understand fried Snickers and fried turkey legs.”
We now know she was thinking up Cowboy Carter at the same time. Last week, while promoting the album art on Instagram, Beyoncé wrote that her new music had been “over five years in the making.” She also shared that the album concept was “born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed … and it was very clear that I wasn’t,” which many took as a reference to the 2016 Country Music Association Awards.
At that show, Beyoncé performed the song “Daddy Lessons,” off of Lemonade—at that point the most country-sounding song she’d ever released—alongside The Chicks. The surprise arrival of a cross-genre superstar at a country music event was buzzy and the performance (which followed Kenny Chesney receiving a lifetime achievement award, introduced by Peyton Manning) was excellent.
Still, after a pre-show announcement teased that Beyoncé would be part of the festivities, some country music fans online started posting about boycotting the show—some in grumbles, some in epithets. After the show, Beyoncé fans also noticed that videos of the performance had been taken down from the CMA website and social media pages. The association claimed the clip was taken down because it did not have proper approval to use it, though TMZ reported it was because of the controversy.
Beyoncé’s aims for Cowboy Carter reach beyond telling her own stories. As she did on 2022’s Renaissance with the queer artists of color who developed house music, this album has been positioned as a study and a celebration of the Black musical tradition in country. But the intersection of the personal, the historical, and the political is Beyoncé’s sweet spot, and the way her story informs her music will draw the line between authentic and academic. A rare sticking point on Renaissance was whether a woman who once rented out the Louvre was the right vessel for a proletariat resilience anthem like “Break My Soul,” though the album’s overall quality, studied references, and record-breaking tour mostly quieted those concerns. In general, Beyoncé drew a personal connection to disco and house through her late, beloved Uncle Johnny, who, in a dedication accompanying that album’s release, she called “the first person to expose me to a lot of the music and culture that serve as inspiration for this album” and someone who also greatly influenced her style. The song “Heated,” off of Renaissance, includes the lyric, “Uncle Johnny made my dress,” and the accompanying tour movie includes a section in his memory.
The link for Cowboy Carter may have to do with the CMAs experience, but the aesthetics of the album suggest it’s also grounded in the rodeo culture of Beyoncé’s hometown of Houston. If you know anyone from there, you’re likely aware that the annual Livestock Show and Rodeo is a major social event in the city, and also one deeply connected to the music world. Beyoncé grew up going to the rodeo and seeing artists like Selena and Frankie Beverly perform there, and she herself has performed at the rodeo four separate times: twice as a member of Destiny’s Child and twice as a solo artist. In 2004, just after releasing Dangerously In Love, she rode in on horseback. She wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat then, though she wasn’t a stranger to the style—the art for the Destiny’s Child single “Say My Name” had Beyoncé wearing a pink one on the cover. There were hats and horses on Renaissance, too, though they were headed for the disco, not the rodeo.
The point, of course, is not to gain entry into the world of a cloistered genre, but to show that it has never been as cloistered as it seems. Just as a movie like The Harder They Fall can reframe who’s included in the romantic vision of the West, the power of being Beyoncé is being able to redefine an aesthetic or a genre in your own image in lasting ways.
Last week, Cardi B did a livestream with fans. It was a little chaotic, in a stream-of-consciousness, Cardi B sort of way. A feature of the chat was that fans watching could “send” Cardi various filters—of mustaches or makeup—that would be applied to her face on the screen. One filter was of a cowboy hat, and when the first fan sent it, Cardi broke into the first few bars of “Texas Hold ’Em” in a silly, bellowing vibrato. It was funny, so another fan sent another hat, and Cardi responded the same way, then another fan sent a hat, and another and another until Cardi was singing the line over and over like a skipping record. These were just shenanigans, but they also showed that, when Cardi B saw a cowboy hat, she thought of Beyoncé.
When Cowboy Carter was announced, Beyoncé posted a caption underneath the album art. “This ain’t a Country album,” she wrote. “This is a Beyoncé album.” So maybe it’s a Beyoncé Hat now, too.