Rhinestone Mythopoeia

Wherein we reckon a bit with the falsehood of autonomy

A lot of people have spent a lot of time pondering how and why the appeal of the American cowboy seems to transcend so many boundaries- class, ethnicity, nationality. I’ve spent some time here too, wondering. But maybe not as much as you’d think- such is the case when an enigmatic aesthetic is so familiar feeling.

I can say for myself that there was an outsider appeal to western wear that first captured my teenage imagination- an adjacency to rabble-rousing trickster energy- art kids, punk rockers, poets. You can see them too, I’m guessing- threadbare plaid pearl snaps, cuffed denim; that, or the starched formality of an ironically donned polyester three piece suit and string tie thinly veiling the wearer’s anti-authoritarian streak. 

If my native Northern Californian art school western wear dialect came with a decidedly irreverent accent, after graduation I soon came into contact with the more dogmatic Montanan vernacular. It was here I learned never to touch another person’s hat after it was doffed, brim up, taunting.

Austin, Texas was where I picked up the rhinestone laden parlance of the rodeo tailor- bombastic, larger than life, fustian. 

Each region wearing its heart on its sleeve, so to speak. My reference points: California, Montana, Texas. A do-si-do around the umbilical holy land of an archetypal uniform. 

The western wear story doesn’t begin in the American West, of course, though the romanticized version of late 1800’s cowpuncher attire was stitched together by the diaspora who’d come to inhabit the territory- either by way of emigration or with indigenous pedigree. If the anima of the American west powerfully inhaled the curious and ambitious and captured these explorer types in a breathhold alongside ancient native wisdoms, then perhaps it is the tenacity of her microbial outbreath that explains the viral nature of cowboy apparel’s global appeal. 

We’re all too familiar now with the impact of a forceful exhale. The infectious mess of hearty laughter, the contagious rapture of song. The way an expelled virus can travel, alight on an updraft and enrobed in a turgid membrane- far afield. 

The American cowboy archetype and its aligned attire has impacted, or infected, the world by all these modalities of breath- the mirth of exploration, mythologies of humans made numinous, the viral allure of sovereign independence.

Wildness, where it abides, will always be the siren song of the curious and ambitious. The fearless and untethered who sing along grant the more timid among us permission to peek out from under the skirts of our maternal safety nets. Collectively, we need these un-boundaried visionaries to break open our neural patterning and allow us to see beyond our perceived limitations. We aggrandize the adventurous in service to our own longing for expansion.

The shadow side of bestowing complex human systems with mythological longing is our addiction to simple narrative and static heroism, however. It’s here we may have frozen the cowboy in amber.

The American cowboy- packaged in buckskin, defanged by embellishments and embroidery and blessed with the dogmatic religiosity of manifest destiny- was sold to the world by journalists and entertainers as a solitary, rugged hero- unafraid to journey into wild “unknown” places. The cowboy became the zeitgeist-mascot of sovereignty in a time when Europeans- emigrants and natives, were abandoning known monarchies and seeking authority decoupled from bloodline. This cultural need for unmerging from authority was ripe for the embracing of a fetishized, sanitized and naive portrayal of the sweetness of freedom.

It’s here where I find things get interesting when it comes to looking at our love affair with western wear. 

The longing for unmerging. Individuating. And our simultaneous deep need to belong.

This endless cycle of becoming that so often takes the shape of defining what we are by pushing against what we are not. The profound irony of identifying boundaries of self through the lens of relationship. We are, all of us, forever in the ebb and flow of merging and unmerging- and we all look for external manifestations of the qualities we strive to internalize. It’s here that the archetypal cowboy has likely landed so profoundly in our imagination as an invitation to ride off into the metaphorical sunset, alone. 

Things get tricky, however, when we become attached to a belief system that prioritizes solitude and autonomy and elevates the individual above the collective. After all, our cowboy might ride off into the sunset, but to what communities does he inevitably interact with in order to survive, and are those relationships symbiotic?

I’m pretty sure we all know where this is going, so i’ll save us all the proselytizing. Instead, in future missives I’d like to share some of the more powerful examples I’ve come across that emphasize the beauty and inherent sustainability of interconnected networks and how impossibly rare and somewhat tragic is the falsehood of autonomy. It’s this frontier that now calls to the courageous- deconstructing the myth of simple narratives. Complicating morality. The fortitude required in maintaining curiosity.

We can clearly see where our obsession with “sovereignty” has landed us. So many islands, so many rulers. How best to move forward? Perhaps our first assignment should be to tackle the notion of what actually defines an individual, and how we might rewrite this definition. Where are the boundaries of a singular human person? After all, it’s upon this conceptual framework that hangs all downstream implications of autonomy, sovereignty and self-reliance. Even moral concepts of right and wrong can be reverse-engineered by bearing witness to complexity.

Western wear as on-ramp to an exploration of complex systems? Who knew? But here we are, or at least, here I am. Hoping some of you will stick this out with me.

Stay tuned! And for those of you curious to read along so you can get a much more nuanced (and well articulated) background from where this whole neural mess of concepts springs- let me introduce you to a few books and their authors who have most recently cracked me open to the harmonics that resonate between science and mythology. More of these to come!

I’m looking forward to sharing more resources and i would love to hear from y’all if you have anything in this vain to share as well- holler at me in the comments!

The Flowering Wand by Sophie Strand

Sophie introduced me to the idea of mythological characters as the fruiting bodies of cultural underground mycelial networks that span time and connect cultures.

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Merlin’s ability to speak about science to laypeople and lose not an ounce of the wonder that infuses his explorations is pure poetry.

How The West Was Worn, by Holly George-Warren and Michelle Freedman

This is my all time favorite of any and all books published on western wear. It’s the most well researched and far reaching, and it’s been a staple of my library since it was published over twenty years ago.

Thanks for reading, and if you’re a subscriber thank you so much for that, as well. We’re really looking forward to bringing more energy to this space in the future, with the ability to converse with all of you in a symbiotic energetic exchange of our own!