Like so many other things that evaporated in 2019's wake — the Area 51 raid, e-Boys, the comfortable feeling of not living in fear of a global pandemic — cowboycore vanished as quickly as it arrived. Born of Lil Nas X's viral song, abrupt demand for cowboy hats, Western shirts, and yeehaw boots rode off into the sunset by the time that the COVID-19 pandemic blossomed.
Until 2024, that is, when Beyoncé and Pharrell began pushing the cowboy agenda hardcore.
Pharrell kicked off January with a blue collar-tinged Louis Vuitton menswear runway show complete with denim chaps and Texas-sized belt buckles. At the end of the show, he took a bow wearing a hat roughly deep enough to contain 10 gallons and boot-cut jeans deserving of a good ol'-fashioned square dance.
Almost immediately after, Beyoncé put on her own glitzy cowboy hat and never took it off.
At the 2024 Grammy awards, Bey was rodeo-ready in LV westernwear (designed by Pharrell, natch).
A couple country-tinged singles followed, leading to an actual yeehaw LP, Cowboy Carter, to be released on March 29.
Around the same time that Beyoncé revealed her album's name, Rihanna graced a new magazine cover wearing what else but her own well-to-do cowboy hat.
Now, it may have been a stylist's selection but Rihanna clearly wasn't put off by the gilded lid. And I'm not saying that anyone else need be, either. I'm not anti-cowboycore, I'm merely given pause by the trend's abrupt adoption among influential celebrities of the A-list variety.
Especially in the case of Bella Hadid, who has spent the year taking a long, deserved break from the public eye. Instead, Hadid's hanging out in Texas with horses and horsemaster Adan Banuelos, her new beau.
But whereas Hadid is embracing cowboycore on her own terms, other famous folks are making the trend into the as mainstream as, well, Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Pharrell.
It does feel a little forced, no?
Not to imply that the yeehaw revival is unwelcome or unpleasant, of course, and certainly not to sideline the movement's historical roots. But if ever a trend smacked of effort, it'd be this new-school cowboycore revival.
The thing is, the new taste for cowboy culture doesn't have the organic groundswell inherent to actual trends, like the Sonny Angel craze or 2023's quiet luxury.
Those movements were all adopted by folks with genuine enthusiasm and hype built from there. The high-profile, top-down spread of cowboycore feels more like the mob wives thing, which was also never really much of a trend. But the folks covering it online sure presented it like it was.
The zeal for all things cowboy feels similarly inauthentic but in a different way. Whereas mob wife content was semi-sincerely crowdsourced — half the people posting about it on TikTok were mocking it, rather than tapping in — Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Pharrell's cowboy inclinations feel more calculated.
There's no deeper conspiracy here beyond, perhaps, Beyoncé and Pharrell coming together to drum up wider interest in their individual projects (and Rihanna incidentally taking part). And if no one else takes part, well, they'll both continue to be wildly successful regardless.
But therein lies the rub.
A trend without participants isn't a trend at all. It's an insider joke, albeit an extremely public one given the platforms enjoyed by its progenitors. And it's not very funny. Though you can't deny that it looks pretty cool. Though that could just be Pharrell and Beyoncé (and Rihanna).
As for Hadid, well, she's living her own damn best life. And if anything actually deserves to trend, that's gotta be it.
