By Leah Asmelash, CNN

(CNN) — Across advertising and popular media, seemingly everyone is grabbing their fringe, denim and Stetson boots, in a wholehearted embrace of the American West.

It’s cowboys – and they’re “everywhere,” said Emily Keegin, a photo director for both magazines and brands. “It’s more pervasive than I think I’ve ever seen a trope in recent history.”

Long associated with a hardworking, old-school, rugged American masculinity, the cowboy’s current popularity could be a reflection of our national politics — conservatives, including members of the Trump administration, have embraced cowboy hats and similar imagery. But today’s prevailing cowboy image also highlights how cultural myths are continuously upcycled and resold, regardless of their origins.

Cowboy-inspired fashion graced October’s issue of Vogue, which featured cover stars Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid on horses at a Wyoming ranch. Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” tour had thousands two-stepping in their country best. The longstanding Western drama “Yellowstone,” its spinoff “1923” and the Billy Bob Thornton-led “Landman” are among some of the most-watched TV series. And a wide range of brands including fast-casual restaurant Sweetgreen and luxury outerwear brand Canada Goose have embraced cowboy hats and rusted-red canyon backdrops in ad campaigns.

“This idea of American patriotism ties into this identity,” said Melynda Seaton, art historian at East Texas A&M University. “And I think now, we’re seeing it more.”

Our ideas about cowboys are divorced from reality

Our collective interest in cowboys can be traced to at least the 1880s, when the Buffalo Bill Wild West shows — a theatrical vaudeville traveling performance — brought romantic and entertaining notions of the West and cowboys to the collective popular culture. Since then, those tropes, popularized by Western films, have reappeared in cycles, Seaton said.

Singing cowboys like Gene Autry and Western actor John Wayne became synonymous with patriotism, further forging the link between cowboys and American identity. That these connections were cemented during McCarthyism and the Red Scare — a time when the American way was perceived to be under threat — is no accident, Seaton said.

“We started isolating this idea of the cowboy being the epitome of American values,” she said.

But pop culture’s depiction of cowboys and the American West is selective. In ad campaigns, television shows, and even in political discourse, the myth of the cowboy is inherently good, inherently brave, inherently tied to the (American) land. The less glamorous side — the poop shoveled, the low wages — is rarely shown.

“One of the things that nobody ever talks about is they only film in the summer for (‘Yellowstone’), because the climate is way too harsh to film in the winter,” Seaton said. “So there’s this weird, only showing the good parts of cowboy culture, but not the bad parts.”

Fashion photographer Richard Avedon exhibited a famous series of portraits from the American West in 1985, having traveled through 17 states and nearly 200 towns from Texas to Idaho. His portraits poked a hole into the romantic mythology of the American West, telling instead a story of poverty and struggle. A North Dakotan farmer with one arm stares at the camera. A 9-year-old boy in Montana cradles a rifle. A Nebraskan slaughterhouse worker’s white uniform is dyed dark with blood.

The New York Times “ripped the exhibition apart,” Seaton said, and many city-dwellers bristled at the harshness of the photos.

Avedon’s portraits are a grim contrast from what we see in old Western films or the fashion and ad campaigns and TV shows of today. The spectacle of the cowboy is so devolved from the actual work of the West, Seaton said, that they exist almost as two separate entities. It is not the actual cowboy that we are interested in; instead, it’s the cowboy costume we have come to mythologize.

Cowboys and the conservative swing

The last time Keegin recalls this level of cowboy costuming was the late 1990s, toward the end of the Clinton administration. “PC culture” was being vilified, she said, and George W. Bush’s Texan twang and plainspoken nature appealed to many.

In other words, there was a pushback against urban-ness and all it has come to represent, Keegin said — liberal values, “elites,” academia, all points still contested today. The cowboy costume’s appeal is in its opposition to that image. As the cowboy image has come to take on these meanings, Republicans’ use of it to gain political favor is well-documented.

“When we decide that there is ‘real America,’ we tend to buy cowboy hats,” Keegin said.

Indeed, this rise in cowboy imagery can be attributed in part to the current wave of cultural conservatism, exhibited not just by the Trump administration but by resurging interest in traditional gender roles and conservative social media stars. That resurgence is mirrored in our cultural imagery.

“We are influenced by the politics around us, even if we don’t agree with those politics,” Keegin said. “The aesthetics of those politics influence our choices.”

Arizona native Ben Christensen is a creative director whose work highlights the American West. A recent ad for Zara featured his daughter and her friends dancing in cowboy boots and hats backdropped against the Arizona desert, and he’s brought his signature Western vibe to other campaigns and brands, too. As the cowboy image has become more ubiquitous, Christensen said more companies are capitalizing on its trendiness. Today, the cowboy represents traditional American values, Christensen said: honest, hard working, God-loving and respectful.

“It’s very old school, but it’s very refreshing,” he said.

Politicians toy with those associations in their own cowboy costuming. Trump, who grew a reputation among some as a “champion of the common man,” does not explicitly present himself as a cowboy in the way of Bush or Ronald Regan. (The latter specifically wore a cowboy hat in campaign materials despite only playing a cowboy on TV.) Yet, historians have noted that his rhetoric and policies play into the individualist and patriotic characteristics associated with the beloved Western cowboy.

“The Trump administration has taken cowboy individualism now to an extreme, I believe, gutting the US government and centering power in a dominant president, while also pulling the United States out of the web of international organizations that have stabilized the globe since World War II,” said historian Heather Cox Richardson during a public lecture at the University of British Columbia earlier this year.

Trump’s investment in Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol — the latter of which has reignited its recruitment presence at rodeos — can also be seen as a product of this overarching cowboy imagery, which “feeds a conviction that true men dominate situations, both at home and abroad, with violence,” Richardson wrote. Just as Hollywood cowboys once defended the American frontier, real ones can now do the same at the American border.

A white-washing in real time

The popular image of the cowboy is not one rooted in the actual history of cowboys — who were originally Mexican, Native or enslaved Black Americans — but rather in myths perpetuated by entertainment. Yet the role people of color have played in the American West is one that has only recently been highlighted and celebrated.

Black horseback riders during the 2020 George Floyd protests ignited a national dialogue around Black urban cowboys that continued through heavy media coverage and, later, photography books and exhibitions. Beyoncé’s 2024 country album “Cowboy Carter” and the ensuing tour was an albeit imperfect education in Black rodeo and country culture. And just two months before the release of “Cowboy Carter,” Louis Vuitton creative director Pharrell Williams showcased dozens of looks during Paris Fashion Week inspired by the diversity of the American frontier.

Gabriela Hasbun is the photographer behind “The New Black West,” a book of photography that highlights modern Black cowboys and the Black rodeo, showcasing the current, active role Black Americans play in stewarding cowboy culture. Hasbun has covered the Bill Pickett Rodeo in Oakland, California, since 2007, and she remembers the days when the audience in the stands was sparse, primarily locals and rodeo people there to support the community. Fast forward to 2022, she said, and the rodeo was completely sold out.

“This is a very hardworking community that puts a lot of effort in making this rodeo happen,” Hasbun said. “They’ve been doing it since 1984, and only until recently have they been applauded.”

Still, the images and political messages being pushed in 2025 continue to rely on earlier stereotypes of the Western cowboy. Urban cowboy culture and the diversity of the West has never been more known, yet its visibility has been a blip.

“Yet again, we’re seeing a trend be ushered into the zeitgeist by Black Americans and then whitewashed a few years later,” Keegin said.

That doesn’t concern Kirk Bailey, president of the Oakland Black Cowboy Association, who has seen the interest in cowboys and horseback riding balloon since 2019. The more people learn about cowboy culture and the diversity within it, he said, the more interested they’ll be.

“I don’t think it’s a trend that’s going to die off anytime soon,” he said.

Perpetuated by popular media and politicians alike, the cowboy costume’s current ubiquity is evidence of the image’s grip on the American imagination. While not always a reflection of the true history of real cowboys, its cyclical commercialization is, in its own right, an American tradition.

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