I have never been to the Trans-Pecos Festival of Music + Love, held every fall in Marfa, that quirky artistic oasis about a seven-hour drive from us, mainly because the timing has never worked out. I have, however, experienced it vicariously through friends’ social media posts, whose casual perfection made them look like unused shots from album covers. Summer dresses with old boots, work coveralls fastened over concert T-shirts, handmade denim jackets, and, above all, lots of fabulous felt hats on the heads of people who simply look good in them. Unfortunately, I have never been one of them.
Could you call it effortless Texas elegance? Maybe. But those festival outfits were also born of sheer practicality: the merciless desert sun gives way to serious nighttime cold, so you have to protect yourself and dress in layers. They just managed to do it exceptionally well.
Long before I lived in Texas, I imagined Texas style based on movies and television. Sue Ellen’s silk and sequins in Dallas. The two competing cowboy styles in Urban Cowboy: sophisticated Pam versus down-home Sissy. Singer Selena’s electrifying purple jumpsuit. So when I moved to Austin twenty-one years ago, its laid-back atmosphere caught me by surprise. Even the most stylish outfits had something homespun about them, as though they sprang from the city’s unwavering loyalty to small local businesses. The slogan “Keep Austin Weird” was more than just a pitch for tourists back then. I learned to buy well-worn pieces at thrift stores, learned to dress up jeans for any occasion, and saved up for dresses and jewelry by local designers on South Congress Avenue.
As I began visiting other cities around the state, I discovered that each had its own unwritten dress code. I remember going to a movie in Dallas with a friend who lived there one Saturday afternoon. As we stood in line for tickets, I realized we were drowning in pearls, blowouts, and gentlemen in linen trousers. “Don’t they know we’re going to see Sexy Beast?” I whispered, suddenly feeling out of place in my weekend uniform of sandals, jeans, and an old T-shirt. Two years later, a longtime Houston resident invited me to a Saturday evening performance at Houston Grand Opera featuring Renée Fleming as the guest star. Formal attire, she insisted, and she meant it. That evening, I learned that Houston takes formalwear seriously. I had never seen so many breathtaking designer gowns in one place. I enjoyed my own moment as Cher in Moonstruck, wearing a long red dress with a soft black wrap. When I went to the opera in Austin the following season, I was still wearing a long dress, though a much less formal one, while the gentleman next to me enjoyed Puccini in shorts.
Over the past twenty years, however, I have watched fashion trends blend across the state and the boundaries between them blur. Austin has lost some of its casualness as people from elsewhere have poured in and expensive designer stores and boutiques have taken root. Dallas and Houston, meanwhile, seem to have loosened up a little and become more receptive to bolder fashion. In my view, this sweeping transformation has been driven primarily by the enormous reach of social media and the rise of online shopping.
Back in 2007, then-fifteen-year-old Jane Aldridge, who lived in a newly built suburban development near Dallas, started an online journal called Sea of Shoes. In it, she chronicled not only her love of footwear but also her admiration for vintage pieces by famous designers, doing so in a fresh and enchanting way. An orange checked Bill Blass coat from the seventies over a simple thrift-store dress, paired with Prada lace-up boots—it was every bit as captivating as it sounds. Enthusiastic coverage in the national press soon brought her fame and legions of followers, but she never left Texas. Today she is married and also writes about cooking and home décor, but she still runs Sea of Shoes. Several years after Aldridge became one of social media’s first prominent personalities, another Dallas woman, Amber Venz Box, figured out how fashion writers could make money. In 2011, she founded RewardStyle, followed by LiketoKnowIt in 2017, where people receive a share of the sales generated when others buy items inspired by their outfits. An entirely new industry was born.
Because Texas has produced a number of popular culture’s biggest names, Texas style has become a highly marketable concept. Beyoncé and Solange Knowles led the way with outfits and broad-brimmed cowboy hats celebrating the roots of Black cowboy culture. Kacey Musgraves, a star straddling country and pop music, appeared at awards ceremonies in Wild West-inspired dresses by Italian designers such as Valentino and Versace. The glittering, rhinestone-studded suits favored by white rapper Post Malone of Grapevine and country band Midland of Dripping Springs helped revive appreciation for the famously flamboyant outfits known as Nudie Suits, worn by country music stars in the last century.
Perhaps no one represents Texas style better today than Brandon Maxwell. Like Matthew McConaughey, he comes from the East Texas town of Longview, where as a child he spent entire days beside his grandmother in a women’s clothing store. He rose to fame as Lady Gaga’s stylist and then founded his own fashion label, but he has never hidden the profound influence Texas women have on everything he designs. In 2018, he presented a new collection, part of which was created during a residency in Marfa, in a show staged like a Texas tailgate party before a football game. At the end, Selena’s Dreaming of You began playing over the sound system. It was the highlight of New York Fashion Week, and a year later he received the coveted Womenswear Designer of the Year award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
One of his enduring inspirations is Houston philanthropist Lynn Wyatt, whose grandfather and great-uncle founded the Sakowitz department stores in Galveston in 1902. Now in her eighties, she is the grande dame of Texas style. When asked in a 2009 interview to describe that ineffable “je ne sais quoi” she possesses in such abundance, she replied that style is a sign of creativity and of knowing who you are.
That combination of a creative approach to life and self-confidence is, I believe, what all expressions of fashion across the state have in common. Whether it is a young girl in a billowing lilac dress celebrating her fifteenth birthday on the steps of the Capitol, a married couple in their seventies dancing in their favorite worn boots on the dance floor at the Old Coupland Inn, or thousands of shoppers wearing Junk Gypsy-style clothing and accessories at the spring and fall antiques fairs in Round Top.
Do we sometimes overdo it? Yes. But even as fashion trends change, that proud Texas self-possession remains constant. I just need a little more of it myself before I finally have a custom hat made. Give me another five years in Texas.
