Hipsters versus cowboys: When fashion worlds collide

Hipster or cowboy? You decide.

​When Westword staff writer Melanie Asmar called out the announcer and rodeo clown at the National Western Stock Show Rodeo yesterday for using Brokeback Mountain references to make gay jokes (personally, I'm more offended they haven't updated their material since 2005), causing the NWSS to promise never to do it again, we wondered what else they could mock in lieu of the gays. Editor Patricia Calhoun suggested "hipsters in skinny jeans (here's looking at you Jef)."

Nice one, Patty. But flawed, because cowboys also wear skinny jeans -- in fact, if you break it down, the similarities between hipster style and cowboy style are pretty striking.

This isn't a chicken-or-egg argument: cowboys have been around a lot longer than hipsters, and there's no argument that it's the hipsters copying the cowboys, not the other way around. But they're really not so different. Take a cowboy, lower the waist of his jeans, subtract the Stetson and add a pair of plastic-rim glasses and you've pretty much got a hipster. I explained this to Patty. She said, "You're cracked."

Am I, Patty? Am I? Ladies and gentlemen, Exhibit A:

The Neckerchief

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Like many hallmarks of cowboy style, the neckerchief as fashion came originally from necessity -- it's dusty out there on the lonesome range, and sometimes you need to keep the dirt out of your airways. For hipsters, it's useful for mopping the sweat off your brow when you're seeing an obscure indie band you've probably never heard of. Also, get a load of that

Mustache

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Indeed, the mustache has long been a hallmark of cowboy style; on hipsters, it's "ironic," meaning that it's like a mustache, but not like a "serious," mustache, but still, like, a mustache. Really, pretty much all hipster styles are supposedly ironic. Hipsterdom entails doing a lot of things but not really doing them. Things, for example, like holding your pants up -- which you might do with a...