If a piece of clothing looks too new on Yellowstone, America’s most-watched television series, now in its fifth season, costume designer Johnetta Boone puts it through a cement roller. Or scorches it with a heat torch. Or roughs it up with sandpaper. Anything that she thinks will give the item a certain patina. Why? Because the show’s characters simply wouldn’t be wearing stuff straight from the store. They would be wearing things they’d already owned for years.
For the uninitiated: The characters in question are members of the powerful Dutton family, who own the largest ranch in Montana and will do anything to keep it, and the people who work on said ranch. The simplest and most authentic word for the latter? Cowboys. Real, modern cowboys who sleep in a crowded bunkhouse and spend their days riding horses, herding cattle, and driving Ford F-150 pickups to keep the Duttons’ property going.
Yellowstone may be a fictional show, but it purports to represent a very real subset of arguably endangered American society: those who live and work in the high, dry, western United States. Boone has dedicated much of the last six years to studying the way such people wear their clothes, and applying her learnings to the series. “Western style is defined by hard work,” she says. Recreating it hinges on nailing down the smaller things: true cowboys, for example, wear jeans way longer than the average American man or woman. “Your typical length on a pair of blue jeans if you are 5’10 is 32 inches—but they wear 38-inch length jeans,” she explains. Why? Because jeans ride up when one rides a horse…and no one wants the top of their boot to show.
Then there are the hats. While many sold in contemporary stores are made of fashion-forward felt, working hands need a style that is waterproof. Hats made of beaver pelt, Boone explains, are considered heirloom items—the kind of thing the wealthy Dutton family would have.
The final piece of the puzzle? “You’ve got to wear not just any shirt, but a shirt with a western yoke and generally pearl snaps,” Boone says. They should also have flap pockets to keep things from falling out.
