Eight icons who made cowboy style their own.

Ranch fashion works because, well, it has work to do. You need proper gear for all that lassoing, riding and shooting. But that’s not the whole story. No one ever wore clothes just because they’re practical. There’s something heroic about cowboys that’s central to the idea of the US itself, so it’s not implausible to view what they wear as a kind of American superhero outfit.

The heady romance of the cowboy in the great outdoors is one of the great American fantasies. He’s an archetype of masculinity as potent as Europe’s knights in shining armour or the samurai of Japan. Every time we slip into a pair of jeans or a flannel shirt, we channel a rugged manliness that’s been a recurrent obsession of art, fashion, music and the movies ever since the birth of the motion picture in the late 1800s.

No doubt some MR PORTER readers really do live a rootin’, tootin’ ranch lifestyle, complete with big sky, big mountain and big log cabin (with Wi-Fi connection), but most of us will likely enjoy the great American outdoors in a rather more vicarious manner. Namely, via the movies and fashion.

So let’s do it. This is how the West was dressed and the icons who wore it best.

In 1979, Mr Ralph Lauren spoke to The New York Times about the allure of westernwear. “The image isn’t fashion, it’s rugged,” he said. “It’s part of American culture. It’s one thing France can’t claim is theirs. It’s ours. My goal is to give it quality and dimension.” Such thinking has always been key to Mr Lauren’s reimagining of the American Dream. So much so that in 2002, he bought a 16,000-acre ranch in Colorado, complete with tepees, cabins and cattle, and named it the Double RL Ranch. In doing so, Mr Lauren turned rustic fantasy into reality. He made the dream come true.

The tale of two ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming forced to deny their true feelings for one another, Brokeback Mountain helped to bring the cowboy movie into the 21st century. The men, played by Mr Heath Ledger and Mr Jake Gyllenhaal with such subtlety and sensitivity, were outwardly stoic and tough, but inwardly tormented. With so much left unspoken, their outfits are left to do a lot of symbolic heavy lifting and characterisation. The sherpa jacket worn by Mr Gyllenhaal, collar popped and buttoned up to the top, is the tough cowboy exterior. Their check shirts, sodden with dried blood, intertwined in one another and found hidden in the back of a closet during a pivotal moment in the film, represent their love and affection for one another.

Mr Gary Cooper was one of the most exquisitely tailored movie stars of golden-era Hollywood, capable of rivalling even Mr Cary Grant for his laid-back yet debonair style. His natural elegance, combined with a well-worn ruggedness, was in part due to his upbringing in rural Montana and a stint at Dunstable Grammar School in the UK. Coop, as he was known, carried this over into performances in cowboy movies such as High Noon and Man Of The West, in which he played preposterously handsome cowboys. There have been many nuanced takes on the cowboy trope, but Coop liked to keep it simple and once instructed a screenwriter to “just make me the hero”. He was the guy who always got the girl, both on-screen and off, and was the epitome of the strong, silent type.

Mr John Wayne is the quintessential American hero. A man will always know where he stands with Mr Wayne. You may not like him, but, godammit, you will respect him. Despite all this unbridled manliness, there is something of the peacock in his style in movies such as True Grit and McLintock!, with his pristine neckerchief, leather waistcoat and bright-red shirts. Mr Lauren has one of Mr Wayne’s cowboy hats in a cabin at the Double RL ranch.

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid turned every cowboy movie convention on its head because, at its heart, it’s a film about the 1960s. For a start, the two leads spend most of the film running away, something Mr Wayne would never do. While the Sundance Kid (Mr Robert Redford) nominally has a girlfriend, Etta (Ms Katharine Ross), the real love of his life is Butch (Mr Paul Newman). The two share a chemistry to rival anything we see in Brokeback Mountain. Let’s not forget the trippy scene where they frolic around on a bicycle to the soundtrack of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head”. And then the final freeze frame, when they turn to face a hail of bullets. Has there ever been a more action-packed fashion image? Mr Redford’s golden mop of choppy blond hair and moustache, shirt collars flying over the lapels of his perfectly crumpled black suit, with his boots kicking up dust. If we didn’t know better, he could be wearing Tom Ford.

Mr Redford’s best buddy in the film and IRL, Mr Paul Newman, doesn’t look too shabby, either. His beige corduroy jacket and pale-blue shirt, lovingly worn in and crumpled, looks like a rougher version of something you might find on the rails of Brunello Cucinelli. The outfit very much chimes with the new relaxed mood in tailoring this summer. A neutral colour palette defined Mr Newman’s sense of style throughout his life. We see it again in Cool Hand Luke, when he wears a pair of battered blue jeans and a singlet. He looks suspiciously pretty for a criminal doing hard labour on a Florida chain gang. But hey, this is Hollywood and, let’s face it, Mr Newman looked suspiciously pretty whatever film he starred in.

Before Mr Clint Eastwood, cowboys were conservative straight shooters. In the 1960s, in films such as A Fistful Of Dollars, Mr Eastwood subverted this trope and reinvented the cowboy as a kind of counter-cultural badass, a morally ambiguous drifter. The poncho, blue shirt, black jeans, hat pulled down low, accessorised with gimlet-eyed stare, a sneer and a cigar out the side of his mouth, reflected the rebel style that was taking hold on the streets of the US during the 1960s. In short, Mr Eastwood made cowboys cool.

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