There’s nothing simple approximately the return of cowboy boots,a trend resonating just as questions around American identity become more complex than everIts not just their cuban heels that are heavy: cowboy boots are freighted with associations. They are James Dean in Giant, reclining under a hazy Texan sky, and Robert Redford haloed by a cloud of dust in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,and Patricia Arquette in the highway phone booth in actual Romance. They are a presage to violence in No Country for Old Men. In western showdowns, the camera zooms in on them. They epitomise the wild wild west, and a risky place of sharpshooters and outlaws.
They can be kitsch – Dolly Partons are pastel-hued and decorated with flowers – or political,worn by Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail and are collected by Arnold Schwarzenegger as a symbol of his allegiance to the US. They represent American pride, the horrors of US history, or the worst of the US present: in October,a pair of cowboy boots decorated with stars and stripes, which had been abandoned by survivor Stephen Vicelja, or became a symbol of the Las Vegas massacre.
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Source: guardian.co.uk