When the American cowboy is discussed in historical dress accounts, Black and Creole cowboys are often absent. This research took an ethnographic approach to analyzing and interpreting the dress practices of Black and Creole Louisiana cowboys. Data was collected over a period of two years through ethnographic field observations, in-depth interviews, audio and video recordings, and promotional event flyers. The investigation yielded a set of unique and evolving dress practices of the Louisiana Black and Creole cowboys. As this article shows, indigenous Zydeco music, hip-hop and popular culture, partner dancing, cowboy traditions, urban and streetwear trends, and southern climate conditions influence these dress practices. Moreover, this article demonstrates how this community is distinct from other cowboy communities. For the Black and Creole Louisiana trailriders, traditional aesthetic expressions connect them to their cultural heritage while modern aesthetic expressions seek to blend external popular culture with internal indigenous culture.

The exhibition Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse (2022) reexamined the British fashion designer’s oeuvre by contextualizing select Alexander McQueen designs within art history. Juxtaposing permanent collection works that spanned media, eras, and cultures with McQueen’s fashions, curators explored the cyclical nature of inspiration against the backdrop of appropriation in art history. As evidenced in his powerful collections, McQueen’s artistic process ranged from thoughtful research and examination to Eurocentric revisions that were both critical of and at times complicit in the legacies of colonialism. This analysis of McQueen’s artistic intent and process initially sought to uncover new frameworks for understanding the designer; however, the thematic conversations between encyclopedic objects also yielded new and unexpected insights for the museum’s non-dress and textile art collections. Investigating McQueen’s fashion collections through a broader art-historical lens enabled significant and mutually beneficial dialogues between both dress and non-dress art historians.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 Bata is the Anglicized spelling of the family name Bat'a. While the eponymous Czechoslovak company name was also spelled with an apostrophe, the Canadian branch—and its head, Thomas Bata, Jr.—omitted it, and the current company maintains this Anglicized spelling. These distinctions are maintained through the book and this review.