When people think of the Old West the most persistent image in their mind will be what they learned from western movies and many episodes of Bonanza. They see cowboys in chaps or colorful characters like Wild Bill Hickok in buckskin and fringe with long hair like a dime store Indian. These images are not entirely unreal as evidenced by my first image: a line of cowboys taking a drink at a bar: this is exactly what most people expect when they think about the Old West. Wild Bill did dress up in buckskins on occasion, just as Calamity Jane did, or other Wild West scouts. Of course at a certain point the cowboy serials and movies became a bit ridiculous and unlikely with our heroes all ‘dudified’ in rhinestones and huge ten gallon hats as they began to reflect the mythos rather than the reality.
The second photo I present, a fairly well-known image from Tombstone, Arizona of the bar at the Crystal Palace shows a far more diverse array of gentleman partaking of libations. In this case you can clearly discern that many of the men are wearing suits and bowler or derby style hats. This would be the far more common view of fashion in the nineteen hundreds in the American West. It was the Victorian and then Edwardian era and just like their contemporaries in the East and in England and Europe men and women bought their clothes to look like everyone else’s clothes. I think you could easily dress modern men in those suits and they wouldn’t be completely out of place as men’s fashions have a tendency to be far more slow moving than women’s. The garb of the cowboy was a working man’s outfit. The Levi jeans crept into our common sartorial parlance from these images of the working man in movies, TV, and then advertising; it certainly wasn’t considered elegant in the Old West. In 1880, for example, a man would only wear jeans for work and never to church. Many of the images of a cowboy show him partially undressed, according to the mores of the time, for instance in his undershirt rather than fully dressed in shirt and vest. A vest, in fact, was required and considered part of the shirt and not the suit and jacket. Unbuttoned shirts with no collar, such as Al Swearengen wears frequently in the HBO show Deadwood, would have shown a man of extremely lax habit and certainly not have been meant to be seen by the ladies.
My final picture, from 1893, from an advertising image, shows a typical man’s suit. This would be worn to the office, behind the counter at the general store, or if freshly pressed could be worn to church. Note the high starched collar and Windsor knot. In the movie Tombstone, which had a fair degree of accuracy when it came to costumes and props, Wyatt Earp is often seen wearing such a collar and tie – as he would have in real life, not a string tie or Stetson as in the early movies and TV shows.
Looking at images of the Old West either from old photographs or advertising art is a great resource and an excellent way to really imagine the daily life as people lived it rather than as movies imagined it. I love leafing through old reproduction Sears & Roebuck catalogues, probably almost as much as they were loved at the time. Without access to television or radio someone living out in Tombstone, Arizona in 1880 would have been starved for news of the world and fashions. Knowing that they were wearing the right tie or frock gave them a passport to their culture even when they were in unfamiliar frontier territory.
Wyatt's Wild West 