Day Trip to the Exhibition "Dude Ranches" in Buttenheim
Text: Nicole K. Konopka
Pictures: Katrin Freudenreich & Nicole K. Konopka
On November 23, 2024, Dr. Konopka organized a day-trip to the special exhibition “Dude Ranches or How Urban Cowboys Became Fashionable” at the Levi Strauss Museum in Buttenheim.
The Levi Strauss Museum showcases the history of the most famous pants in Western history. The museum opened in 2000 in Buttenheim because Levi Strauss was born and spent the first 18 years of his life there – before emigrating to America and becoming the official inventor of jeans. His immensely successful innovations revolutionized workwear and the clothing industry more broadly, and led to the global popularity of jeans.
While the permanent exhibition demonstrates how significantly Levi's jeans have influenced the world of fashion and workwear, the "Dude Ranches" exhibition provides fascinating insights into the life and culture of the American West, which is closely linked to the tradition of ranching and cowboy culture.
During our visit to the exhibition, we learned that “dude ranch” tourism in the 1950s was instrumental in popularizing Levi's jeans as a fashion item, allowing city dwellers to experience the “Wild West” and its lifestyle first-hand. During their stays on cattle ranches, guests began to appreciate the durable jeans and later wore them with pride in their urban environments. It is particularly noteworthy that female visitors used this unique tourist destination to escape certain gender-specific constraints, embracing a kind of fashion whose symbolism was in part shaped by narrow, even discriminatory notions of gender and race. The exhibit illustrates how “dude ranch” tourism transformed jeans from a pair of work trousers into an (often emancipatory) fashion statement.
We would like to thank Dr. Tanja Roppelt and her team, and look forward to our next visit!
