When Beyoncé decided to hint at her forthcoming country album drop, she did so with fashion: a black, studded jacket from Pharrell Williams’s fall–winter 2024 Western spin on Louis Vuitton, worn to the 2024 Grammy Awards. Celebrity Western-wear designers once outfitted country royalty—Buck Owens, Porter Wagoner, Hank Williams—for the stage, helping craft an image of the American cowboy (the singing kind, at least) as a collaboration between musician and designer. The fringed and swaggering rhinestone cowboy of the American imagination emerged in part from that collaboration. This February, Beyoncé in her studded jacket called to mind the old cowboy mythmaking machine.That was just the start: Everyone wanted cowboy boots this year. Leather fringe. Denim on denim. With Cowboy Carter leading the charge, Western wear became…