I have to hand it to TikTok’s “horse girl” phenomenon. As August wears on, the “rodeo girl” and the jodhpur-clad Sloane Ranger 2.0 are still enjoying their moment in the sun (the latter thanks to London-based designer-to-watch, Laura Andraschko).
Style-wise, we’ll remember this as the summer in which everyone we know bought Western boots and a tiered cotton boho skirt (accessorised with a semi-ironic lower back tattoo inked in Ibiza). The summer when media mogul Martha Stewart celebrated her 83rd birthday at the Paris Games, watching the dressage with longtime friend Snoop Dogg (both in full equestrian attire), and when Gigi and Kendall trotted through Place Vendôme for Vogue World (their horses, Django and Napo, wearing nose-to-tail Hermès, naturally). This is the summer that Bella Hadid, queen of the horse girl community, “ran a few barrels” in a bandana shirt and blue rancher denim.
Hadid is currently enjoying quality time away from the spotlight with her boyfriend – and real-life cowboy – Adan Banuelos. Glimpses into the rural life they share offer a persuasive reminder that a) bootcut jeans exist (and are incredibly flattering), and b) offline – and off-the-map – romance isn’t dead.
I’ll be honest, I’m not obsessed with horses (growing up, I wasn’t exactly the pony club type), and I would advise you to exercise caution around anyone who can describe themself as a cowboy without any detectable hint of irony. But here’s the thing: the romance of horse-girl life lies, of course, in escapism. The trend is an invitation to dream; a tonic for the malaise of modern dating, and, most importantly, it comes with a timeless uniform that speaks to a preppy outdoorsy-ness, which feels very now.
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“I think about Bella’s Texan horse-girl life all the time,” a close friend confided recently. We’d been sipping on adaptogenic mushroom smoothies, and our conversation up to that point had consisted of quickfire situationship updates. “Me too,” I whispered, squeezing her hand.
I Googled a sentence Joan Didion wrote in John Wayne: A Love Song, which I’ve thought about an inordinate number of times this year. In 2024, it articulates the feeling one has for horse-girl life as a non-horse girl – a kind of longing which doesn’t attach itself to anything in particular, but longs nonetheless. I spun my phone in her direction.
“As it happened, I didn’t grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western,” Didion writes. “And although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.” We finished our smoothies in silence.
Looking back, this sentence was likely responsible for the chink in my hardened Vogue editor armour, which led to what happened next. Amid the pulse-quickening romance of horse-girl summer, I decided I’d prefer to channel the horse.
Seated at my desk, on a particularly warm afternoon in London, I pulled on Alexander McQueen’s cinched take on the barn jacket and took out a hairbrush to smooth the mane flowing from my hoof boots.
“How do they feel?” my colleague asked.
“Comfy,” I said, raising a leg to swish my tail. “Purposeful.”
My editor had suggested I road-test Alexander McQueen’s viral boots to see how they fared in reality. I said yes, immediately. The horse girls could keep their alluring French twist updos and midriff-baring tie-up shirts, I thought. Didion had sparked a realisation in me that, oddly enough, tallies with McQueen’s new era: I didn’t have to be the heroine in the western, or John Wayne. I could, if I liked, be Dollor, the chestnut quarter horse (who went on to become Wayne’s favourite four-legged co-star).
Officially billed as a “black leather boot featuring a hoof-inspired round toe with horseshoe sole, a tonal strap with a silver-finished buckle and a ponytail on the back of one foot”, the hooves debuted on Alexander McQueen’s autumn/winter 2024 runway, 35-year-old creative director Seán McGirr’s first collection for the storied house, which is well-known for the eyebrow-raising, brutal beauty of its founder’s designs. Elsewhere in the collection (staged at a disused railway shed on the outskirts of Paris): laminated jersey dresses inspired by The Birds, Lee McQueen’s spring/summer 1995 collection, and kick-flare bondage jeans.
“It should have a sort of playful aggression to it, and should be kind of uplifting, because I want to bring a kind of lightness to McQueen,” McGirr told Vogue’s Sarah Mower before the show. His new McQueen muse? “It’s a man or woman who are hedonistic characters. In a way it was like, these sort of people who modelled for McQueen in the ’90s, they kind of looked like people on the fringes. Outsiders. I’m really interested in that. So I guess it’s about singular characters with really strong personalities that I’d be very curious to meet on the street in London; this sort of rough glamour of the East End.”
With this in mind, the hoof boots are actually clubwear by way of Mr Tumnus the Faun. Fetishistic, ugly, weird, and unnervingly wonderful to walk in, they hint at London’s subterranean worlds. When I left the office on my lunch break, clip clopping to Leon for a rice box, Vogue’s video wunderkind suggested we instead jump in a cab to Buckingham Palace, the scene of Horse Guards Parade, just for the fun of it. On the way, I took out a comb to detangle my ponytail. We wondered aloud what Lee McQueen would have made of TikTok, and its rabid appetite for trends.
“You buy the attitude of McQueen, and the attitude is London,” the designer once said when quizzed on his brand’s ‘lifestyle’. “I design for individuals… I’m not about lifestyle, I’m about individualism.”
At the Palace gates, tourists snuck photos of my feet, eyebrows raised in curiosity at the sight of the horse shoe. I posed melodramatically against the railings, counting the pairs of Adidas Sambas in the crowd. London is still a place where Lee McQueen would have fun, I thought as I clambered back into the cab. As for McGirr, isn’t it refreshing that he doesn’t seem to give that much of a damn about “lifestyle” – that exhausting, crowd-pleasing side of fashion? McGirr’s London is young, rambunctious, witty, alive – a place where he’ll hang out with Charli XCX and Troye Sivan when they’re in town.
As for horse-girl summer? I like McGirr’s take on thinking more expansively about how we dress. There is, he added backstage, a “kind of bitchy intelligence that kind of comes through a little bit in the attitude of the boys and girls”. I’ll let you know when I make it to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.
