Beginning in the mid-1970s and through the mid-1980s, Polo Ralph Lauren, one of the world's most popular fashion design companies, created a series of clothing collections for men and women focusing on the theme of the Old West. One of the most popular figures Polo used in its advertisements for these collections was the cowboy.

Using gender and desire as the framework for my analysis, I would like to explore this figure, the cowboy, and how gender informs Polo Ralph Lauren's representations of him. I will also consider how these representations compare with other gender representations of the cowboy in popular and scholarly records.

Above: Made to Be Worn? (Figure 1)
© Polo Ralph Lauren
Vogue, Sept. 1979, 20-1.

Specifically, I would like to consider how the cowboy's sexuality, as depicted in popular books and film, has informed his visual representation in fashion magazines, and whether those visual representations open or close doors to sexual pleasure and desire by viewers. Some of the questions I would like to ask are: Do Polo's advertisements featuring "cowboys" position the viewer as a heterosexual and if so, must the viewer adopt this position when looking at them? (1) What sexual pleasure(s) may be taken in looking, for example, at an advertisement for "Western Wear" (one of Polo's collections) in which a handsome, suntanned man in an unbuttoned denim shirt smiles at the camera? How has the image of the cowboy been appropriated by different groups and for what ends? I examine these questions below.

Gendering the West

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much discussion of masculinity in the West by writers, filmmakers and artists centered around the notion that masculinity was a pure and unadulterated essence. According to these cultural producers, the "Man of the West" had a natural masculinity in part because he lived simply, off the earth. Owen Wister's writing in the late nineteenth century reflects these sentiments. For example, in his 1895 article for Harper's Monthly titled, "The Evolution of a Cowpuncher," Owen Wister writes of the Anglo-Saxon man's "natural" propensity for wilderness and the West:

Adventure, to be out-of-doors, to find some new place far away from the postman, to enjoy independence of spirit or mind or body (according to his high or low standards)—this is the cardinal surviving fittest instinct that makes the Saxon through the centuries conqueror, invader, navigator, buccaneer, explorer, colonist, tiger-shooter [. . .]. [. . .] Deprive the Saxon of his horse, and put him to forest-clearing or in a countinghouse for a couple of generations, and you may pass him by without ever seeing that his legs are designed for the gripping of saddles. Our first hundred years afforded his horsemanship but little opportunity. Though his out-of-door spirit, most at home when at large, sported free in the elbow-room granted by the surrender of Cornwallis, it was on foot and with an axe he chiefly enjoyed himself. (2)

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