The Boot in Popular Culture:
From the Screen to Haute Couture

The Singing Cowboys: The Boot Becomes Costume

As early as the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood invented the "singing cowboy" (Gene Autry, Roy Rogers), who took over from the stars of the silent western such as Tom Mix, already encountered as a customer of the Hyer house. On these screens, the boot stopped being a mere work tool: it became a costume piece, designed to read on camera, photogenic before it was functional. It was in this context that the toe, until then rather round or square for practical reasons, began to grow sharper and longer: a cinematic aesthetic that would shape the boot's silhouette for good, long after the classic western had faded.

From Western to Screen: The "John Wayne Toe"

After the era of the singing cowboys, the golden age of the Hollywood western fixed the boot's silhouette for good in the world's imagination. In October 1951, John Wayne walked into the Lucchese workshop (already encountered in the article The Founders) and ordered a boot with a pronounced square toe: the shape would become so recognizable that it was christened the "John Wayne toe." The actor remained a loyal customer and a personal friend of Sam Lucchese, who would shoe him all the way through True Grit and Rooster Cogburn.

The myth then crossed the Atlantic against the current. For Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964; For a Few Dollars More, 1965; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966), Clint Eastwood built his "Man with No Name" character with his own boots, tan-colored, brought from his own wardrobe. A delicious irony: these foundational westerns were shot not in the American West, but in the Tabernas desert, in Andalusia: the very region that is home to the old Spanish bootmaking tradition, discussed in the article The Boot Beyond North America.

Midnight Cowboy: The Boot of Exile

In 1969, cinema flipped the image. In Midnight Cowboy, by John Schlesinger, Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, a naïve Texas dishwasher who lands in New York in flashy cowboy getup (boots included) to sell himself to wealthy women. Far from the bright hero of the singing westerns, the boot here becomes the costume of an uprooted man, the relic of a dream that shatters against the city. The only film ever rated X to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (to which it added those for direction and adapted screenplay), it fixed for good a murkier reading of the icon: the boot can also dress solitude and illusion.

From "Hillbilly" Music to "Country and Western"

According to Michael Grauer, of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, the musicians who played what was then called "hillbilly" music adopted the cowboy aesthetic (boots included) to give the genre a more mainstream image. It was this turn that would lead, in the 1950s, to renaming the genre "country and western." The boot, then, does not merely accompany the music: it actively helps build its image.

Nudie Cohn and the Age of the Rhinestone Cowboy

It was the tailor Nudie Cohn (a Ukrainian immigrant who became the tailor to Nashville, Tennessee's stars, whose full story is told in the series The Western Shirt — Tailors of the Rodeo) who carried the rhinestone aesthetic over to the boot. From the 1950s on, the rhinestone-studded suits he made for Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Roy Rogers, and Porter Wagoner came with matching boots: the boot, ornamented to excess, became an ostentatious sign of success in the country-music world: a stage costume as much as a shoe. The expression would pass into everyday language with "Rhinestone Cowboy," the song by Glen Campbell (1975, written by Larry Weiss): number one on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the country chart, it made the "rhinestone cowboy" a figure as famous as it was bittersweet.

The Cowboy as Camp and Queer Icon

In the late 1970s, the cowboy silhouette (boots, hat, tight jeans) took on another life, on the disco floor. In 1977, the French producer Jacques Morali founded the Village People by drawing on the virile archetypes of urban gay culture: the cowboy, the biker, the construction worker. The cowboy, played by Randy Jones, became a camp emblem (an American masculinity performed tongue-in-cheek), popularized by hits like Macho Man (1978). The western boot thus entered, for good, the visual vocabulary of queer culture, where it has never stopped being worn and reinvented.

Urban Cowboy: The Boot Conquers Urban America

In 1980, the film Urban Cowboy, with John Travolta and Debra Winger, shot around the Texas honky-tonk Gilley's, set off a genuine rush on the western boot: including among city-dwellers who had never been near a ranch. Lawyers and bankers took to wearing boots with tapered toes and contrasting vamps, like the ones seen on screen. The phenomenon reached well beyond cinema: the house of Ralph Lauren, in the early 1980s, folded the western boot into its high-end ready-to-wear collections, completing its transformation, already begun by Nudie Cohn, from rural object to status symbol.

The Presidential Boot: A Symbol of Identity

In the United States, the western boot has also taken on a political role: that of a marker of authenticity and rootedness, Texan in particular. Lyndon B. Johnson, a native of the Texas Hill Country, was one of Lucchese's most faithful customers from 1952 on; once president, he received from the public a pair of black alligator boots by Tony Lama, embossed with the presidential seal, now kept at his presidential library in Austin, Texas. Ronald Reagan in turn wore Tony Lama boots in full quill ostrich (the back skin, the most prized, touched on in the article Leathers and Hides) stamped with the same seal.

The symbol reaches its peak with George W. Bush: on the eve of his inauguration, at the Texan "black tie and boots" ball (the subject of the article Codes and Customs), he lifted the hem of his tuxedo to reveal boots embroidered with his initials, the presidential seal, and the Lone Star of Texas. Many of his pairs came out of the workshop of the Houston, Texas, bootmaker Rocky Carroll, nicknamed "BOTUS" (Bootmaker of the United States), who has shod seven presidents from opposite sides of the aisle. From the saddle to the Oval Office, the boot remains a powerful visual shorthand: that of a leader who claims roots in the land and in work.

Yellowstone: The Phenomenon Repeats Itself

Forty years after Urban Cowboy, history repeats itself: since the launch of the series Yellowstone in 2018, the western boot has seen a new peak in popularity, dubbed the "Yellowstone effect" by the industry. The phenomenon reaches well beyond American borders: as far as Japan, where the men's magazine Brutus devoted a fashion feature to the cowboy aesthetic, or Germany, where young city-dwellers adopted the style of the show's characters. On the music side, the phenomenon had already been foreshadowed, in 2019, by "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X: this unprecedented crossing of country and trap was at first removed from Billboard's country chart (judged not "country" enough, a decision immediately read as an act of racial gatekeeping) before setting a record 19 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. The boot was everywhere in it, from the video to the countless covers. On the fashion side, the "coastal cowgirl" wave, viral on TikTok in the summer of 2023, extended the movement by marrying the western aesthetic to the beachy codes of the East Coast. More unexpected still: the singer Beyoncé, with her open country turn (culminating in the album Cowboy Carter in 2024) helped widen the western boot's audience toward a more urban and more diverse clientele. This movement has a name: the "Yee-Haw Agenda," a phrase coined in 2018 by the Texan Bri Malandro to describe Black culture's reclaiming of the dress codes of the West: hat, boot, and cowboy boot foremost. Far from a passing fad, this reclaiming revives a reality long erased from screens: African American cowboys (many of them formerly enslaved) made up nearly a quarter of the cattle drovers in the 19th century, the subject of the article Western Roots — From Vaqueros to Modern Arenas. More than a century after the 1875 order to Charles Hyer, the boot keeps migrating between the ranch, the screen, and the street: without ever ceasing to belong to both at once.