Photographer CHRISTOPHER CURRENCE
Bucking broncos and luxury logos collide as cowboy culture lassos the zeitgeist. Seventeen-year-old Najiah Knight is breaking barriers while riding 1,600-lb bulls, and Kamal Miller swaps dusty chaps for Louis Vuitton’s Paris runway. From Beyoncé to Bella Hadid, everyone’s playing cowboy—but for these rodeo stars, it’s no costume party. Giddyup, fashion’s going west.
Even for “the toughest sport on dirt,” few in the world of bull riding are kicking up as much dirt as Najiah Knight.
A 17-year-old high school senior from small-town Oregon, who barely cracks 5 ft and weighs just 100 lbs, Knight regularly rides 1,600-lb bulls, ranking among the country’s top professional miniature bull riders. Such early success means deals have already been inked with William Morris Endeavor, Cooper Tires, and Chad Berger Bucking Bulls, arguably the best stock contractor and bull breeder in the Professional Bull Riders (PBR) league.
It should be noted that Knight, who has been described as “upending the world of professional bull riding” by Vogue, is a young woman in a male-dominated arena. “I definitely see myself as a trailblazer,” Knight tells me during a recent conversation at her family’s home. She describes herself as “someone who is breaking down the barriers that prevent girls from being professional bull riders.”
In 2020, she was the first female to ride New York’s Madison Square Garden, where she made history when she beat her fellow male competitors in the third round of the miniature bull riding competition. “I plan on knocking down even more doors,” she says, matter-of-factly. A partial sampling of “firsts” she hopes to grab by the horns in the near future: the first woman to compete at Unleash the Beast (the PBR’s top-level tour), the first to be named Rookie of the Year, the first to win a world championship.
The trail-blazing bull rider Najiah Knight
On the surface, Knight’s model good looks and youthful charisma make her an ideal ambassador for helping rodeo cross over to the mainstream. But, she says, it’s not like “I am not into doing my nails or anything like that.” (That hasn’t stopped strangers from messaging her on Instagram, telling her to “go back and play with your dolls,” she adds, bemused.)
Knight instead chooses to stand out from the competition by donning beaded hat bands, necklaces, and ribbon-like accessories attached to her chaps—pieces made by her “Auntie,” as she put it lovingly. The beaded battle armor is a tribute to her family’s Paiute heritage—people who have been part of the Klamath Tribes living in the Klamath Basin of Oregon since time beyond memory. “I told my dad that bull riding is what I want to be doing since I was, like, three years old,” she says, adding that her supportive family knows that “no matter what, I will never hold back.” She shrugs off whether or not her background fits the western-movie stereotype of the lone ranger. “People care more about how I go out and face that bull,” she says, a grin breaking out beneath her angular cheekbones. Still, “if there is another woman Native bull rider out there, I have yet to hear about her,” she continues.
Visibility was certainly center stage at a June rodeo held at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Portland, when Knight and some 7,200 other bull-ride devotees decked out in cowboy boots and colorful Stetsons attended the second annual 8 Seconds Juneteenth Rodeo. (The name comes from how long a bull rider has to last to score.) Heralded as the city’s first Black rodeo, the event was put together by the celebrated rodeo photographer Ivan McClellan, whose recent photo book Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture was declared a “stunning visual celebration” that “reorients dusty notions of a classic American pastime” by The New York Times. Featuring 40 Black rodeo athletes from around the country competing in bull riding, barrel racing, bulldogging (steer wrestling), bareback riding, and steer undecorating (the women’s equivalent to steer wrestling, which involves pulling a piece of tape off the back of a steer), the rodeo sold out weeks in advance.
“The energy is very different from any other rodeo—way higher, which I enjoy,” says Kamal Miller, a 29-year-old bull rider from Carson, California, who also attended the event last year after hearing about it through McClellan’s Instagram page. Besides the roughies vying for a share of the $60,000 in prizes, attendees were treated to mechanical bull riding, line dancing, and roping lessons. The comedian X Mayo was on hosting duties, DJ O.G.ONE provided hip-hop music sets, and vendors operated by small Black businesses sold everything from boots and turquoise jewelry to wigs. “A lot of people don’t even know that Black cowboys existed, but we’ve existed this whole time,” Miller says. “It is new to the rest of the world, maybe, but it’s not new to us.”
That is not to say Miller himself hasn’t been enjoying newfound attention. In January, he walked Louis Vuitton’s menswear show in Paris, appearing on the western-themed runway in a 10-gallon hat, steel-toed boots, and a checkered rodeo jacket from Pharrell Williams’s “Wild West meets melting pot America” collection. “When I did that show, a lot of people saw my face for the first time,” Miller says. Now, “fans stop to take a picture and everything like that.”
While critics parsed whether or not a luxury French fashion house’s spotlight on Indigenous, Mexican, and Black cowboy motifs (such as parfleches with hand-painted designs by artists from the Dakota and Lakota nations) was virtuous or virtue signaling, the experience felt “authentic” to Miller, an actual cowboy. “Pharrell told me that he just wants to shine a light on cowboys that were usually not recognized in today’s world, or overlooked,” he says. “He told me he just loves the culture and style of cowboys, so he wants to use his platform to show the world that, you know, this is hot right now. And it’s been hot.”
Dapper Dan x GapDapper Gap
Williams is hardly the only famous figure embracing the cowboy way. Dapper Dan’s recent collaboration with Gap features western-style denim looks inspired by the “original cowboy.” This spring Amber Valletta cosplayed as mother of the ranch on the cover of M, the style magazine of Le Monde. In June, Levi’s released a capsule collection of vintage-esque denim inspired by the queer “Rainbow Rodeos” that took place in Nevada in the 1970s. And the black button-up shirts, black boots, black cowboy hats, and blue jeans sported by the rodeo star Adan Banuelos are now photographed by paparazzi (almost) as often as the It-girl wardrobe of his girlfriend, Bella Hadid.
In fact, just about everyone these days is letting loose and spurring a few licks, from the cowboys of the streaming-era neo-western Yellowstone to Cowboy, a sprawling exhibition challenging “long-held assumptions about cowboys’ relationship to land” on view until mid-March at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Lana Del Rey has been cooking up her new country album, Lasso, though it’s unlikely the record features anything as close to a hog-killin’ time as “Sweet Honey Buckiin,” the Cowboy Carter closer produced by—who else?—Pharrell, on which Beyoncé sings to the world about “buckin’ like a mechanical bull.”
Adan Banuelos and Bella Hadid
Kamal Miller walking at the FW24 Louis Vuitton menswear show
Najiah Knight
Miller at the 8 Seconds Juneteenth Rodeo earlier this year
