The cowboy look is a fanciful construction of an ideal cowboy image. Originally, cowboy clothing provided primarily function over fashion, but through America's century-long fascination with this romantic Great Plains laborer, image has surpassed reality in what a cowboy ought to look like. With the supposed closing of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century, the ascendancy of the Cowboy President, Theodore Roosevelt, and the growing popularity of artists such as Frederick Remington and Charley Russell, who reveled in a nostalgia for cowboy life, wearing cowboy clothes became akin to a "wearing of history" as twentieth-century Americans tried to hold onto ideals of individualism, opportunity, and adventure supposedly tied to the clothes' frontier heritage.

Of primary importance in the construction of cowboy fashion are the highly stylized cowboy boots. A mass-produced and mail-order footwear near the turn of the century, these boots...