Cowboy hats, boots, and jeans are just a few clichéd garments associated with country music. It’s
a genre whose many styles act as a key part of its identity and performance. Fashion is also a site
where country’s borders are both extended and suppressed. This panel will consider the
influences behind country music’s style and how these fashions have offered inclusive and
exclusive sites of contestation. We consider topics such as the rise of the hunter/fisherman
masculine ideal as performed by artists like Riley Green and Luke Combs, the strict style
boundaries of race and gender played out on the Grand Ole Opry stage, the Mexican origins of
“American” western wear, and what evolving headwear says about country music’s changing
class politics. We consider how country music’s many fashions act not simply as superficial
attire but as key sites where the genre’s shifting race, gender, class, and power politics are
continuously constructed and performed.
INDIVIDUAL ABSTRACTS
“Huntin’, Fishin’, and Lovin’ Every Day”: Country Music’s Evolving Masculine Ideal
Will Groff
In 2015, Luke Bryan released “Huntin’, Fishin’ and Lovin’ Every Day,” a twangy ode to his
favorite outdoor leisure activities. In the first verse, Bryan waxes poetic about the pleasures of
being in the woods, singing about being “high on a hill” and “never worry[ing] about the price of
gas.” The music video plays out like a Bass Pro Shops ad, with shots of Bryan sporting various
outdoorsy outfits while partaking in the titular activities.
The song and its video are emblematic of country music’s increasing preoccupation with outdoor
recreation and the central role of the outdoorsman image in reshaping the genre’s ever-evolving
masculine ideal. While the flamboyant Nudie Suits and pearl snap shirts of yore haven’t
disappeared, today’s male country stars often adopt a more casual, “everyman” aesthetic. This
shift mirrors broader trends in the fashion world, where workwear and outdoor apparel have
become prominent in streetwear culture and high-fashion collections.
Accordingly, country’s embrace of outdoor recreation has presented its stars with opportunities
for brand collaborations and marketing opportunities. For example, look no further than Luke
Combs’s Columbia PFG (Performance Fishing Gear) shirts, on sale at his website for a cool $75,
or “duckman” Riley Green’s Real Tree Camo collab.
This paper examines how male country stars are using outdoor apparel to perform masculinity
and curate an “authentic” country image. It places the outdoorsman in a lineage of masculine
country personas, from Jimmie Rodgers’s “Singing Brakeman” to the singing cowboy image that
dominated the genre’s imagination starting in the 1930s. This outdoorsman costume allows
today’s country singers to remain relatable to their audiences by projecting a rugged and vaguely
working-class masculine ideal, even as they push a consumerist fantasy of aspirational living and
turn a profit in the process.
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Mexican Origins of Country Music’s “American” Style
Nadine Hubbs
What do corrido, norteño, Tejano, Duranguense, banda, and country music have in common?
They share the hats, boots, western shirts, belts, and buckles that serve as rugged workwear for
the cowboy and have long influenced daily dress for the rest of us. It’s a style recognized the
world over as iconically American, by association with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,
twentieth-century Hollywood westerns and singing cowboys, and country music stars up to
today. But in fact, it’s a style that started out definitively Mexican and remains so, as ropa
vaquera (cowboy kit) and, in regional music genres, the look of Mexican sound.
Another mainstay of country music style is the Nudie suit. Named for the Ukrainian immigrant
tailor Nudie Cohn, the spangly, embroidered ensemble could well be called the Cuevas suit,
given the importance of Manuel Cuevas’s contributions to the genre. Before moving to the
United States and working as Cohn’s assistant, Cuevas learned his trade as a tailor and clothing
designer in Mexico. There, the postwar Nudie suit appears as kin to the traje de charro/a
(equestrian suit). With roots in the sixteenth century, the elegant, embroidered regalia of the
genteel horseman and horsewoman became a nineteenth-century symbol of Mexican
independence and later, the costume of mariachi and ranchera musicians.
In research for my book project Border Country: Mexico, America, and Country Music, Mexican
American country fans spoke appreciatively on the Mexican aspects of country musical style.
But in mainstream U.S. perspective, country’s Mexican dimensions go unrecognized.
Spotlighting the visual and sartorial, I will argue that some of the attributes of country music
regarded as most iconically American are actually Mexican. And I’ll consider the implications of
such misrecognition for country music’s claims to quintessential Americanness and for social,
and cultural, justice.
“My Own Kind of Hat”: Headwear and Country Music’s Evolving Class Politics
Amanda Marie Martinez
From cowboy hats to ball caps, headwear has always been central to country music’s fashion.
Hats have also symbolized the genre’s evolving class politics, especially when it’s come to
performances of masculinity. When country music was first invented as a marketing category in
the 1920s, it was called “hillbilly” music and was associated with stereotyped, rural southern
attire akin to overalls and a straw hat. In following decades, as the singing cowboy took over
popular culture amid the Great Depression and World War II, country singers gravitated to the
cowboy hat. Not only was this in tune with trends of that era, it also helped the genre battle
classist discriminations that it experienced due to its associations with a white, rural, and
southern demographic. The cowboy was much more respectable than the hillbilly. By the 1960s,
cowboy hats fell out of fashion, especially as bedazzled Nudie suits emerged as the ultimate
marker of country music’s authenticity during that period. By the late 1970s, the cowboy hat
returned—this time in a feathered, straw version as the Urban Cowboy craze dominated popular
culture. In rece
