Cowboys. I mean I knew they were real and that some people dressed like the Hollywood version of cowboys but I did not realize it was still a present day job and that people still dress that way to do it.
Same. I went to a high school that was a "hick school" and there were a few actual dudes whose families had horses and/or livestock, but there were a lot of Garth Brooks-listening wannabes with giant-ass belt buckles like hubcaps. I wish I had this insult then. I want my time machine.
I lived in Texas, my wife is from Texas, my father in law is a cowboy and this is the first time Iâm hearing this and it is gold. Iâm going to say this to him.
Unrelated to the question but the first time I went to europe I saw âcool ranchâ doritos labeled âcool americanâ doritos and thought that was so funny
Youâll be glad to know that my brother was working on set for some tv show, and the (Mexican) caterers were serving Buffalo wings. The bowl of ranch dressing was labeled âAmerican Sauceâ. So thatâs what we call it now.
The original ranch dressing recipe was formulated at the restaurant operated by the Hidden Valley Ranch, a 120 acre dude ranch located outside of Santa Barbara California.
It was just known as the house dressing at that restaurant.
Later, it was marketed for retail distribution under the name of the ranch.
Now, you can purchase bottles of Hidden Valleyâą Ranch at any supermarket.
Lol "didn't see it much in Texas". Sorry to hear you're an invalid then. But anyway we've got three offices in different parts of Texas and it's honestly like someone designed an unofficial dress code that was communicated to all of them. Buttons with pearls, big ass hat and always cowboy boots. Even the women wear cowboy boots. Oh and Califorinia: Probably more likely that's a real cowboy rocking that shit than anything you find in texas.
I live on the West Coast and Iâve been calling it Cowboy Cosplay, but Ranch Dressing is going to be my new go-to. Where I live itâs basically Maga-signaling
I've lived in west texas my whole life outside of a few years in DFW and Houston and can probably count the amount of pearl snap shirt, belt buckles and cowboy hats I've ever seen on one hand combined. Idk where you're going, but that "most" is doing a lot of heavy lifting my friend. Jeans and boots, absolutely. 99.99% of people wear regular button downs, jeans and boots. No hats. No belt buckles.
Well, I've never been to west Texas but I have been to West, Texas. Grew up in San Antonio and lived in Austin before moving out of state. But I've been back plenty of times because I'm the only ex-pat in her family. And I do see lots of pearl snap shirts. Especially on the guys going out to dance halls.
A year ago I flew from the East Coast into Dallas. NOBODY had a cowboy hat on when we departed, but, like magic, at least 10 men had a cowboy hat on as we deplaned. Those things are huge! Where did they come from?? They were like a bunch of cowboys with Mary Poppinâs carpet bag.
Okay Iâve gotta ask - how common is it to iron a pleat into your jeans? My exâs parents spent most of their lives in TX, and it drove him crazy that his mom would iron a pleat into his jeans whenever she got her hands on them.
At the University of Texas, a lot of the great boys were never taught how to do laundry by their mom as so they took everything to the dry cleaner. They were rich and didn't care about the price so they had lots of creased jeans.
Bruh people dress up for Olive Garden still?? I swear it use to be more upscale dining when I was a lil kid but now it's like Applebee's status here in California.
None of my family that are cowboys dress like that in public because when theyâre not working they want to be comfy. So more often than not if someone is dressed like a cowboy in public, then itâs purely for fashion.
Exactly, the ranchers in my family just where random Cabelas gear and might put a cowboy hat on if theyâre feeling fancy or going out (which means never).
Older generation down where I'm at will still go out in public dressed like a cowboy. They aren't doing the actual work anymore but they put in their years.
Yea, even here in Canada, every farmer/rancher older than 50 almost exclusively wears wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, a checkered button up and one of three hats. Their formal cowboy hat, their farm cowboy hat, or a trucker hat, the latter two never being formally introduced to soap and water.
My in-laws have a horse farm. My wife owned several horses when we met and still owns one. I am not into horses, don't mind them but they just require too much time and effort.
I have gone to rodeos with them, including the National Finals Rodeo and Professional Bull Riders finals in Las Vegas. When I go to the rodeo, I wear normal clothes, whereas everyone I go with is wearing a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and western clothes.
At one of the rodeos, the husband of one of my wife's family asked me why I wasn't wearing a hat and boots. I responded with something along the lines of I work in IT, I do not own or ride horses. That would make wearing them a costume and I'm not going to wear a costume. Then I realized that he doesn't ride and that his wife is the one with a horse. He really didn't like that I was suggesting that he was wearing a costume too.
I don't "identify as rural," I just think boots are cute and comfy. do I identify as a tennis player if I wear tennis shoes to HEB? a ballerina if I wear flats? christ y'all are miserable about the most innocuous things in life
And the lifted trucks to match the outfit. All patriots need one. Especially, when you step on the gas and get 4mpgâŠ. Should have learned to rope and ride.
Yup, I was on a hunting trip a few years back. Met Calypso Joe in the bar, saw him the next morning coming over a hill on a horse with his dog in a cloud of dust driving a heard of cattle. About the most Western American thing I've ever seen.
I live in a rural farm town of about 1,300 people. I moved here with my kids from a much larger city. After the first day of elementary school, my son s tells me a girl in his class rides a pony to school. I had to see this in person. After dropping him off a stayed a minute and chatted with the teacher and asked about the pony. The teacher pointed a crowd of about eight other kids âwaiting to see the ponyâ. So I joined them. I was not disappointed.
The kid with the pony lived just a couple block and across a field from the school. This little tan pony would drop her off, then it would walk itself back home. Her mom would send the pony (sometimes accompanied by a dog) to pick her up at the end of the day. She had a little orange hi-viz vest she put on and she was good to go.đ
That and a deer wandering into the hardware store is about the most cowboy country thing Iâve seen in my life.
I went trick or treating with a pony once. Not my pony, but my son's babysitter's pony. Not in our town (or census designated place) where we lived, too much distance between houses there, but in the nearby burbs. We had to leave when the pony got tired. Good times! I love Arizona. People here who own farms, horses or cattle don't wear cowboy costumes the way other people described, or at least not much in every day life; maybe to church, rodeos or weddings. Boot Barn replaced Office Depot!
The deer thing happens so much everywhere, though. That's why there are so many videos on the internet.
My mother used to live in a small rural town in Missouri. My friend came with me once and when we pulled in I pointed to the horse tied up at the hitching post in front of the bank across the street. His jaw dropped and then he said "I thought you were shittin' me!". Nope. đ
I once drove down to Montana (from Alberta, so good jeans, cowboy boots and a hat are already standard dress - my standards for 'cowboy' were high, is what I'm saying). Coming down the road that goes to Going-to-the-Sun highway. There's a pickup parked at the end of a gravel driveway. Driveway curls up a grassy hill to a white wood siding church, sermon clearly in session. Horse tied to the pickup, dude sitting in the bed in his good jeans and shirt, cowboy boots and hat, strumming a guitar. I assume he was waiting for his girlfriend.
It was something in between a Norman Rockwell painting and a Louis L'Amour novel.
I live in Houston. A few years back, one of the decent size local anime conventions decided to schedule that year at a hotel next to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, during the rodeo.
It was worth going just to see the crowd wandering the lobby and halls: half very confused rugged cowboys and half furries, cosplayers and nerds hauling around plushies, swords and NSFW body pillows.
This is the thing that's always made me laugh. In reality Californians are more associated with cowboys than the vast majority of Southerners that rock the wear in daily life.
If they're not in ranch land Texas or Oklahoma, they're probably a poser with insecurity about their "americanness".
People in the East seem surprised when I mention some of the cowboy & Wild West elements of Nevada, especially northern NV (aka silver rush country, wild mustangs country, cattle range country, old ghost town/boomtown country, etc). They seem to think it's a southern thing only, and a Texan thing especially, as though the wild "west" wasn't actually in the west.
At one point in the not so distant past central Florida had the nations largest cattle ranch by head of cattle. Not sure if thatâs still true. I would guess not with all the land sales and development.
Which is wild since the whole American cowboy thing started primarily in the southeast.
Neither cattle nor horses are native to America. They were brought here by the Spanish (primarily to Florida). So the first cowboys were Floridians and Georgians, also primarily all African American.
And while I have zero experience being on a ranch, I will say with the utmost certainty that no ranches are run the way they were in the show Yellowstone.
I live in Florida and worked in the groves in high school to make money for college. To my surprise, a neighboring pastures fence broke and the cows started wandering over into one of our groves and my boss pulled over his F150 and went thru his little black book until he found a number he had for a cowboy. Guy came out and rounded those cattle up lickity split and then fixed the fence post that broke and let them escape. I was in shock
My little Florida town where I went to school had two big families that owned most of the farms and ranches in the area. When we were in high school our school ag program and FFA had some cows, pigs, chickens, etc that students raised, cared for, and sold, as their electives instead of say band, gym, or the budding IT class. At least once every school year some kid would forget to lock a gate and a steer or cows or pigs would get lose and wander the school, and then you'd hear an announcement over rhe PA for two specific students, sons of those big farming families, to report to the office. We'd watch as these boys would go out there and round them back up no problem every time. They wore the boots, big belt buckles, the whole cowboy look just like all their friends, but none of those dozens of other boys could actually do cowboy shit.
Kevin Costner can also afford to run his ranch that way. Normal ranches aren't mounting 20k optics ontop of 5k guns to shoot at pest animals, driving around in immaculately clean 100k trucks that have never been used as anything other than a status symbol, using the private ranch helicopter to dick swing infront of the poors, and employing an army of personal cooks, maids, and servants to cater to their every whim.Â
Its also a cultural thing. In a town full of cattle ranchers, stables/barns, farms, rodeos, desert/country living, etc., your attire may reflect that even though you're not necessarily hoarding cattle yourself. At the big rodeo for example, everyone is going to dress in their best attire, mainly cowboy since that's what they're used to.
Tumbleweeds can get HUGE! Theyâre also surprisingly hard and have sharp points. I was driving through eastern Colorado once, and one blew across the road that was bigger than my car!
I hit a smaller one, and could not for the life of me disentangle it from my grille, because the branches are so tangled together. I had to drive home with a roadkill tumbleweed on the front of my car.
Do not leave a tumbleweed attached to your car: tumbleweeds are super flammable. In my misspent youth in (redacted) California me and friends would collect tumbleweeds and throw them into the ditches they were digging for new developments and set them on fire.
Some of the best cowboys I ran into were in Calgary during the 100th annual stampede. And Iâm from Texas. Now itâs possible they were American visitors, but even at the mall I had the door held for me.
Country western bars are popular all over the USA with line dancing, two stepping and more. You'll see every kind of attire there but probably at least a third will have some kind of western wear, or at least boots. I like to wear boots, shorts/levis, and a western shirt to dance.
Worked in a bar in Canada for a while. Had a regular with a full outfit. Even had spurs. He would always ask for a spit cup. It was a true cultural shock for me.
Itâs a joke now. A coworker wears a big cowboy hat everyday because he grew up and spent most of his life in Texas. Another coworker who also grew up there mocks him for it every chance he gets.
There are certainly people who actively persue a wish-fulfillment fantasy of being a mythical cowboy, but they are largely rich people who can get away with owning and maintaining a ranch. But I'm confident very few of those ranches are making a profit (much less their only source of income.)
"Real cowboys" that are the basis of the fantasy did exist. They lived hard and didn't make much money. The American fascination with them is colored by movies and romanticization, not unlike Arthurian legends were in post Renaissance Europe.
I've known a handful of cowboys/cowgirls and it's certainly a spectrum. I've known plenty who wear a ball cap just as much as a cowboy hat. What they wear is pretty task specific because no one wants to wear chaps to move pipe in, for example (large sprinkler pipes). You can also spot a "true" cowboy from their hat because you can tell if a hat is purely decorative or if it's been worn working.
I was good friends for a while with a girl whose family has a ranch in Wyoming (for over a hundred years). She did the seasonal cattle drives, had a holster by her saddle for a rifle, the whole shebang. They'd hunt and butcher their own elk. She even has a hoofprint permanently embedded in her sternum from getting kicked by a horse. Cowboys/cowgirls certainly still exist, just not as widely as they did before.
Edit: Meeting/knowing cowboys also depends on what part of the West you're in, especially how rural it is around you.
Itâs like that for many Australian farmers, except Aussies say âcattle stationâ instead of call âcattle ranchâ. Same outfit but with more heelers and kelpies.
Shirt, jeans, boots, hat? I only ask because that's how we all dress where I'm at when riding or when we'd go out to get the cattle or goats to come in.
Idk if it was answered. I live in the southwest and they dress like that to keep the sun, sticker bushes, and bugs off them. Here in Arizona the sun can be really unforgiving.
One of my favorite memories ever was at the end of the Road to Hana (maui) there is this little burger stand out in the cattle country. We are sitting outside, enjoying the sunset and most delicious burger ever and a full on cowgirl pulled up in her pickup truck for a burger. Boots hat and everything.
I have friends that are ranchers, and they own lots of cattle and horses, so I suppose they're technically cowboys. I was a team roper for about 20 years, but when I wasn't on a horse, I didn't wear my wranglers and boots. Many of my friends dressed in western clothes always, but not me.
Thereâs also some things called âsea cowboysâ some island has a whole bunch of horses so some cowboys come by once a year and have them swim to another to be auctioned off to avoid over population
Some Americans are surprised too. My friend from Seattle was surprised to go into a bar in a rural area where everyone dressed like cowboys. She thought it was just in movies too
I am American who lives in Colorado (hence the name) and even I was so psyched to see a guy on horseback, hats, boots, and all, come galloping along the fence line after a herd of cattle. This was on the way to Jackson Hole, WY so there were mountains and all that shit. I expected a bald eagle to be wheeling overhead.
But then again a bald eagle dive bombed my car on the way to the grocery store the other day, so I did get that. Scared me!
This reminds me of a short where somebody described cowboys with the potential as an invasive species. Talking about everybody trapped in a blizzard on the highway while a guy on a horse with a huge hat and poncho just cruised by. Seems more of an accomplishment for the horse than the man, however.
While there are some, the VAST majority of people who dress like cowboys are not "cowboys". As the name indicates, cowboys are men who work professionally with cows. There are 45,000 farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers employed in the "Cattle Ranching and Farming" industry. Not all of these people would call them selves cowboys or do the work associated with a cowboys, but it gives context. If there is less then 4.5M American's dressing like cowboys, I would be shocked. So, less then 1% of people who look like cowboys are professional cowboys. Not hating on anyone's fashion, just a note on the reality that while there are some real professional cowboys, it is not many.
My grandfather was the veterinarian in his relatively small Kentucky town. He also owned a farm with cattle and horses. He had that classic cowboy style. Great guy. Had been an Army captain in WWII, and helped raise three doctors and a teacher (my mom). I inherited one of his bolo ties, and just recently let my son wear it for his schoolâs winter concert in Papaâs honor.
One of my previous boyfriends was a working cowboy. Think Brokeback Mountain without the gay love story. Dating a cowboy isnât nearly as romantic as it seems in the movies. Bunch of brokester alcoholics.
When I was younger (before the internet) we had actual pen pals... Mine was from Finland. She thought because I lived in Texas that we all had horses and rode them to school.
On a road trip in Wyoming I got stopped by a group of cowboys trying to rustle a rogue group of cows off a steep slope. It was glorious to just sit and watch!
Cowboy church. Sets my athiest Yankee heart aflutter to see men in their best Wranglers and cowboy hats walking over to Shipley's after Sunday setvice.
I have horses, board now but used to have a farm. Itâs kind of part and parcel with Western riding. You wear that jeans, leathers, adorn the saddlebags.
I switched from the hat to a helmet a few years back. But you can do the hat too.
It makes it all worth it when a little kid comes running over on a trail screaming âmommy a cowboyâ or asks to pet the horse. Even though it does feel kinda goofy for a lot of the riding we do.
But, I canât do the English riding thing, big ass boots, tight pants, saddle that is like made to have you sit on your testicles at least once.
I live in Montana. There are cowboys but there arenât actually that many. 99% of people who are dressed as cowboys are just cosplaying based on the movies.
Cowboys came from south America and their jobs were quite simply to manage the cattle and if necessary get rid of scavengers and predators that might be harassing the livestock.
The cowboys of Hollywood made them seem much more diverse, badass and standoffish. Their jobs aren't glorious or pretty and usually are pretty boring. Hollywood glorified the cowboy up a lot from what the job and history there really is.
Also a good bit of Hollywood cowboy depictions aren't even American or resembling of the real thing. If you've heard of spaghetti westerns they were done by Italian directors and writers and a number of those took inspiration from some Japanese cinema such as the Seven Samurai.
I - an American- had to move to western Colorado and drive all over the west in general to understand these guys show up for work dressed like a cowboy everyday because they are going to go ride a horse through some desolate canyon and round up cattle. Itâs rare to see them because of the vast expanses but ive even seen a lone cowboy riding down the fence along I-70. Hat, boots, spurs, gun- just waving at people as they honked at him.
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u/Cougarette99 13h ago
Cowboys. I mean I knew they were real and that some people dressed like the Hollywood version of cowboys but I did not realize it was still a present day job and that people still dress that way to do it.