Marfa Has a Dress Code. Nobody Wrote It Down.

Cowboys, cowgirls, artists, movie stars, locals, visitors, and the one piece of clothing that somehow belongs to all of them.

I've worn blue jeans for as long as I can remember.

Maybe being born and raised in Texas had something to do with that. I remember my grandparents in jeans and pearl-snap shirts, the sort of clothes that didn't really need explaining. They were just what you wore.

I started young and never really stopped.

Over the years I've gone through more brands, cuts and styles than I could probably remember, but I keep coming back to Levi's. Depending on the day, you'll usually find a pair of 527s, 501s or 510s somewhere in the rotation. Different fits for different moods, different jobs, different versions of the day.

Which, come to think of it, may explain a lot about why I like denim in the first place.

It's versatile.

A pair of jeans can be practical without looking purely practical. They can be comfortable, durable and fashionable without feeling especially precious about any of it. They work with boots, sneakers, a T-shirt or a jacket. They can get dirty. They clean up pretty well. And unlike most things we buy, a good pair often gets better after you've owned it for a while.

Somewhere along the way, jeans stopped being something I chose to wear and became something closer to a uniform.

There really isn't a day when I'm not wearing denim.

Maybe that's part of why Marfa has always felt comfortable to me.

I'd been wearing the dress code since I was a kid.

Before the Cowboy, There Were Vaqueros and Vaqueras

Before we get too far into blue jeans, there's something worth clearing up about the cowboy.

The iconic American cowboy didn't spring fully formed from a Hollywood Western.

Long before cowboy culture became one of America's most recognizable exports, Mexican vaqueros and women who worked within these ranching traditions were part of a culture built around working cattle from horseback, with techniques, tools and customs that would eventually become synonymous with ranching across Texas and the American West.

The influence runs deeper than most of us probably realize.

The Texas State Historical Association notes that Anglo ranchers arriving in Texas borrowed heavily from Spanish and Mexican ranching traditions. Over time, the distinctions blurred. Saddles, chaps, lassos, spurs and stock-handling techniques with Hispanic roots eventually became so commonplace that people stopped thinking of them as Hispanic at all.

They simply became Texan.

That story is particularly important in a place like Marfa.

The border is nearby, but the cultures on either side of it have never behaved as though somebody drew a perfectly impermeable line through the desert.

Ranching knowledge, food, language, families, labor and traditions have moved through this landscape for generations.

And when photographer Russell Lee arrived outside Marfa in May 1939, we can actually see some of those people staring back at us.

A Ranch Outside Marfa, 1939

Lee came to the Walking X Ranch near Marfa while working for the Farm Security Administration.

His photographs aren't staged images of the romantic American West.

They're documentation.

Men and women going about ranch life. People riding. Cattle being rounded up. Calves being branded. Meals being prepared. People washing after work.

The Library of Congress collection contains more than a hundred photographs from Lee's time around the ranch and specifically identifies Mexican cowhands among his subjects. One photograph is titled simply Mexican cowboys washing up after roundup. Cattle ranch near Marfa, Texas. Another shows Mexican boys branding a calf.

There's something I love about these photographs.

Nobody appears particularly interested in creating an aesthetic.

They're dressed to work.

Boots. Hats. Work shirts. Denim and durable trousers.

The clothes make sense because the place demanded them.

That's an important distinction.

Before Western wear became fashion, it was simply what people wore to do Western work.

And Marfa was very much a working ranch town.

In fact, the Marfa and Presidio County Museum describes the community as the product of "diverse and disparate elements" Hispanic and Anglo culture, art and ranching, beauty and isolation.

That description could have been written specifically for this story.

Because long before Marfa became famous for bringing seemingly unrelated people together, it had already been doing exactly that.

Then Hollywood Came to Town

Of course, America eventually figured out that all of this looked pretty good on camera.

In the summer of 1955, Hollywood arrived in Marfa.

Not quietly.

George Stevens brought Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean and a small army of cast and crew to West Texas to film Giant.

The Texas Film Commission describes the production as essentially invading tiny Marfa for the summer. Much of the cast and crew stayed at the Hotel Paisano. Stevens screened daily footage in the hotel's ballroom. Locals drove out to the Evans Ranch to watch filming on an open set.

Imagine Marfa in 1955.

Ranchers and local families going about their lives while Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean are suddenly having drinks down the street.

Actually, that still sounds reasonably Marfa.

And then there's Dean.

His Jett Rink begins as a ranch hand and eventually becomes an oilman, but the visual language surrounding him is unmistakably Western: boots, work shirts, hats, denim.

Something important had happened to jeans by then.

They were still work clothes.

But they were also becoming something else.

Cool.

Hollywood helped turn denim from something miners, ranch hands and laborers wore into part of the mythology of the American West. Levi Strauss's own archives trace that transition through Western films, including John Wayne wearing 501s in Stagecoach in 1939, as jeans moved from practical Western clothing to cinematic shorthand for the cowboy.

Eventually denim would move even farther from cowboy to rebel, from workwear to fashion.

The ranch hand and the movie star could now wear essentially the same thing for entirely different reasons.

Marfa, appropriately enough, had room for both.

Then the Artists Showed Up

A couple of decades later, another outsider arrived.

Donald Judd moved from New York to Marfa in 1971.

The story of what happened next has been told plenty of times. Judd acquired buildings and land, including parts of the former Fort D.A. Russell, created permanent installations and ultimately helped establish what became the Chinati Foundation. Marfa gradually became an international destination for contemporary art.

It was an extraordinary transformation.

A railroad stop turned ranching center turned military town was becoming a place where people traveled thousands of miles to experience contemporary art in the desert.

And yet, look through photographs of Judd in Marfa and you'll notice something remarkably familiar.

Blue jeans.

There's a Laura Wilson photograph from 1993 of Judd standing in front of his 15 works in concrete at Chinati.

One of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century.

One of the most important installations of contemporary art in America.

West Texas desert stretching behind him.

And denim.

I don't want to over-intellectualize this.

I haven't found a Donald Judd manifesto on blue jeans, and I'm fairly certain the world doesn't need me to write one for him.

I just like the photograph.

Because by then Marfa had changed dramatically.

Its pants hadn't.

Marfa Reinvented Itself Without Completely Changing Clothes

That's what I keep coming back to.

The vaquero traditions helped shape the cowboy.

Workwear became fashion.

Ranch country became an art destination.

And somehow the same basic clothes kept moving between these worlds.

Maybe denim works here because Marfa itself has never become only one thing.

Ranchers.

Mexican-American families who have called this region home for generations.

Artists.

Border Patrol agents.

Architects.

Musicians.

Gallery owners.

Bartenders.

Writers.

Hotel workers.

Designers.

Filmmakers.

Tourists.

People who moved here thirty years ago.

People who arrived yesterday and are currently standing in front of a restaurant Google assured them would be open.

Marfa just keeps adding layers.

And blue jeans somehow move effortlessly between nearly all of them.

We've said before that Marfa has no dress code. Turns out we were only half right. There's no rulebook. But there's definitely a uniform.

Hollywood Comes Back for Its Clothes

Then Hollywood returned.

Or maybe Hollywood never entirely stopped looking toward Marfa.

In 2006, two movies were being filmed around Marfa at essentially the same time.

Not two forgettable movies, either.

No Country for Old Men.

And There Will Be Blood.

Both would eventually compete for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The Texas Film Commission confirms that the two productions were simultaneously using the Big Bend region around Marfa during the summer of 2006.

Which feels almost comically appropriate.

Marfa apparently wasn't content hosting one bleak masterpiece about men making questionable decisions in the American West.

It needed two.

No Country, Same Jeans

No Country for Old Men takes us to West Texas in 1980.

And look at Llewelyn Moss.

Josh Brolin isn't dressed like some romanticized Saturday-matinee cowboy.

He looks like a guy who belongs in West Texas.

Boots.

Western shirts.

Jeans.

The Texas State Historical Association notes that portions of the movie were filmed around Marfa and Big Bend National Park, including the memorable dog-chase sequence.

What interests me isn't the exact brand or cut of Moss's jeans.

It's that decades after Giant, filmmakers are still reaching for essentially the same visual vocabulary to tell us something about a person and a place.

Put the clothes against this landscape and we immediately understand something.

Western.

Practical.

Independent.

A little dusty.

Probably not headed to a black-tie dinner.

The clothes have become a language.

There Will Also Be Blood

Meanwhile, a few miles away, Paul Thomas Anderson was using the same landscape to travel even further backward in time.

There Will Be Blood tells the story of turn-of-the-century oilman Daniel Plainview.

The Texas Film Commission's archives show that Anderson sent location-reference photographs while searching for a landscape capable of bringing that early oil world to life. The production eventually filmed around Marfa and nearby Shafter during the summer of 2006.

Daniel Day-Lewis's Plainview occupies an earlier version of the West than Llewelyn Moss.

Heavy work clothes.

Boots.

Hats.

Suspenders.

Clothing designed around labor.

And here's where the whole thing becomes wonderfully circular.

Marfa's landscape was being used to recreate an earlier American West while, nearby, another production was using that landscape to recreate West Texas in 1980.

At the same time.

There's a famous story from the productions that smoke from preparations for There Will Be Blood's burning oil derrick drifted into the Coen brothers' view, forcing No Country for Old Men to abandon a day of filming.

One movie's West had literally drifted into the other movie's West.

Even by Marfa standards, that's a fairly competitive art scene.

The Great Denim Equalizer

Walk around Marfa today and the costume changes continue.

You will eventually encounter two people wearing remarkably similar faded jeans.

One pair may have spent the last decade fixing fences.

The other may have spent the last decade carefully hanging in someone's vintage collection before being purchased for considerably more money than the first person would consider reasonable.

One person earned the hole in the knee.

The other paid extra for it.

Both somehow look completely appropriate.

And I don't think one is necessarily more authentically Marfa than the other.

That's the interesting part.

We like using clothes to figure people out.

Cowboy.

Cowgirl.

Artist.

Local.

Tourist.

Rancher.

Designer.

But Marfa is unusually good at making that exercise unreliable.

The person in dusty Wranglers might own cattle.

They might also own a gallery.

The woman in boots and a pearl-snap shirt might have grown up nearby.

Or she might have gotten off a plane in Midland four hours ago.

The person who looks like an artist might actually be fixing a fence later.

And the person fixing the fence might very well be an artist.

Marfa doesn't make judging books by their covers impossible.

It just lowers the accuracy considerably.

Some Patina Is Earned. Some Comes That Way.

There's another reason denim belongs here.

It ages well.

Actually, that's underselling it.

Good denim gets more interesting after you've lived in it.

The color changes. Creases appear. Knees fade. Pockets leave outlines. Maybe something gets torn and repaired. Eventually a pair of jeans becomes a record of the person who wore them.

The fashion industry, naturally, figured out how to manufacture this process.

Stone washing.

Sanding.

Distressing.

Whiskering.

Strategically placed holes.

We have industrialized looking like we've been through some things.

Which is objectively pretty funny.

But the desire makes sense.

We like things with character.

Marfa understands that.

Adobe cracks.

Steel oxidizes.

Leather darkens.

Paint fades beneath the West Texas sun.

Wood dries.

Old buildings acquire scars.

Dust settles on absolutely everything approximately eleven seconds after you've cleaned it.

Things don't necessarily become less beautiful here because they show their age.

Sometimes that's when they become interesting.

Jeans understand the assignment.

From the Ranch to Vogue

And here's perhaps my favorite little detail.

In 2016, Vogue published a guide for city dwellers traveling to Marfa.

Think about the journey we've just taken.

Mexican cowhands working cattle outside Marfa.

Russell Lee photographing ranch life.

James Dean making the Western look cool.

Donald Judd standing among concrete works in jeans.

Josh Brolin wandering through No Country for Old Men.

And now Vogue is explaining Marfa to New Yorkers and Angelenos.

The same little West Texas town had traveled from ranch country to international fashion and design destination without actually moving anywhere.

That's the versatility of the place.

And maybe the versatility of denim.

The Uniform I Didn't Know I Was Wearing

Which brings me back to my own closet.

I didn't start wearing jeans because of Marfa.

If anything, the story runs the other direction.

I grew up in Texas seeing denim and pearl snaps around me. My grandparents wore them. I wore jeans as a kid, experimented with plenty of brands, cuts and styles along the way, and somehow kept circling back to Levi's.

501s.

510s.

527s.

Depending on the mood and what the day requires.

Maybe that's what I've always liked about denim.

It adapts.

Dark or faded.

Straight, slim or bootcut.

New or old.

Pristine or patched.

Boots or sneakers.

Work or dinner.

The jeans don't ask whether you're headed to a ranch, a gallery, a job site, a bar or somewhere in between.

They just go.

Marfa has a similar quality.

It has spent generations absorbing different people, cultures, occupations and ideas without ever becoming only one thing.

Ranching and contemporary art don't merely exist near each other here. They've become parts of the same identity.

Mexican and Anglo traditions have overlapped for generations.

An adobe building can contain something extremely old or something extremely new.

Pickup trucks park beside rental cars.

Hollywood can turn the landscape into 1950s Texas, 1980s Texas or turn-of-the-century California.

Somebody can spend the morning working cattle while somebody else spends it contemplating the relationship between a concrete box and desert light.

Eventually, they may end up standing next to each other ordering a beer.

Possibly wearing the same jeans.

The Common Thread

Maybe calling denim Marfa's unofficial uniform is taking things a little too far.

Marfa tends to resist anyone declaring what Marfa is.

That's probably one of its better qualities.

But look through the photographs.

Look at the ranch hands.

Look at the vaqueros and vaqueras.

Look at James Dean.

Look at Donald Judd.

Look at Josh Brolin.

Then look around town today.

The people change.

Their reasons for being here change.

Marfa changes.

And the blue jeans keep showing up.

Maybe that's because jeans don't really belong to any one of these groups anymore.

They belong to everybody.

Cowboys and cowgirls.

Ranchers and artists.

Locals and visitors.

People who work with their hands and people who make things with their heads and plenty of people who do both.

People who wear their jeans until the knees actually give out.

And people who bought them with the knees thoughtfully pre-destroyed.

There's room for all of them here.

That's Marfa.

A collection of people, histories and ideas that shouldn't necessarily go together, but somehow do.

And maybe that's why I feel so comfortable here.

I didn't come to Marfa looking for a uniform.

Turns out I'd been wearing it most of my life.

Until next time, Becca and Rob