Field Report: The Marlboro Shirt Rides Again at Diamond Cross Ranch
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It was an inversion of the Hollywood trope; the cowboys got saved at the eleventh hour. A location scout turned off U.S. Route 287, the cattle truck-clogged interstate winding the 1,791 miles north from Amarillo, Texas, toward the Buffalo Fork River, gushing out of the Tetons south of Yellowstone. It was the late 1980s and America was facing a beef shortage. Financially-strapped ranchers, many of whom had taken out loans to limp through the recession earlier that decade, were selling off their herds to pay down debt. Betty Feuz, owner of Diamond Cross Ranch, was no exception.
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The scout was looking for a place to shoot Marlboro ads and Feuz, who was in her 70s at the time, was more than amenable to the idea. Her grandson Luke Long, who now runs DCR as a resort and event venue, said the photoshoots saved the ranch. Marlboro was first. Then came Wrangler, Anthropologie, and Filson. After that, Jackson Hole became a beacon of wealth in the state, with the highest income per capita in the country. DCR no longer has a herd, but Kanye West recorded his album Ye there. The ranch has also hosted Kardashians, as well as leadership from companies like Disney, Microsoft, and Toyota.
With a clientele like that, it was inevitable that souvenirs from DCR would become desirable status symbols. It was not inevitable that the Long family would create a fully-fledged streetwear brand or that Channing Tatum would be grammed and re-grammed wearing a DCR hoodie. But like the arc of a lasso in the air, time moves in a circle. No one on the ranch forgot about the Marlboro scout.
Around about the same time the scout arrived, Wayne McLaren, the rodeo rider who became the first Marlboro man, announced publicly that he had lung cancer. In 1992, McLaren showed up to the Philip Morris annual meeting as a protester. Executives said they weren’t sure he’d ever really worked for the company. Profits were up, but the colors – technically Boston University red and University of California gold – were beginning to fade. By the mid 2000s, the Marlboro logo, a white peak rising against a red sky, had been stripped off video games and Indy 500 jackets. By the turn of the millennium, as the widespread harm caused by cigarettes became clear, major tobacco companies reached a $206 billion settlement with 46 states that banned most advertising for tobacco products, including on merchandise.
Now, an altered version of that old familiar logo — three white mountains, a reference to the Tetons – is rising on DCR apparel, which also upcycles the old slab serif font. The clothing looks fantastic. The Marlboro branding worked because it was so profoundly evocative. But it’s clear where the inspiration for what might be called the first “trailwear” brand came from.
Not that Luke Long is hiding it. He’s not. He doesn’t love the language of reclamation; he describes the T-shirts and hats as an homage. He’s even hired some of the same photographers that used to shoot Marlboro ads that were, in fact, themselves an homage to his family’s way of life. Culture circles back on itself. A rattlesnake makes a loud meal of its own tail.
“I try to infuse our shirts with bits and pieces that tie back to Jackson Hole and our family’s 100-plus-year ranching history,” says Kirby Long, 25, who manages the bulk of the design work. “The images on our T-shirts are often drawn from old photos of Luke’s grandfather, Walter, riding a bucking horse in the Jackson Hole rodeo in the 1930s. I feel like the more knowledge you have of Jackson Hole, the more you’ll go, ‘Aha, I knew I recognized that.’”
A shirt featuring the actual photo is their best-seller, Luke says.
It’s Kirby’s goal to replace the imaginative iconography of Marlboro — Clint Eastwood reaching for a dart — with real memories of a real place: dances behind barn doors. A group of sisters trailing cattle for 35 miles. Ranch hands cycling in and out for work. For reasons related to fiction, her timing couldn’t be better.
According to Nielsen rankings released this spring, Yellowstone is the most-watched scripted show on TV. The show follows the Dutton family, who own a Montana ranch bordering the Broken Rock Indian Reservation, trying to save their land from developers. Like Jackson Hole, a small blue dot, the show has red-state aesthetics, but leans left. Creator Taylor Sheridan has been publicly critical of Trump (who he refers to as “that motherfucker”), while riding the hyper-American, anti-cosmopolitan ethos of his show to a payday big enough he now owns one of the biggest ranches in Texas.
The Longs get compared to the Duttons on Yellowstone. They don’t mind.
“When Yellowstone became a huge hit and there was a wild interest in everything cowboy,” Luke says. “We thought, we could do like a Fear of God, hand-drawn, oversized graphic tee with a lot of color. We wanted to do what these streetwear brands in Los Angeles were doing, and make a T-shirt that was so good that everyone wanted to know where it’s from.”
DCR has replicated that look over and over, from their own tees to their collaborations with PacSun and Revolve. It’s a far cry from the state of their business five or six years ago, Luke says, claiming that they were selling between $10,000 to $20,000 in merch per summer to guests on the ranch. Now, he says that they sell millions of dollars worth all over the world annually.
“There was no ‘Kate Upton wearing a Canada Goose coat on the cover of Sports Illustrated’ moment where suddenly our brand took off,” says Kirby. “The growth was always sort of steady word of mouth — one customer at a time. Friends tell friends.”
And they haven’t accepted any outside capital, either, Luke says.
“We could fast track growth a lot with investment dollars, but to us, it’s important to maintain full control,” he explains, saying that the VF Corporation’s purchase of Supreme in 2020 “sacrificed some of what made them special in order to pursue faster growth and bigger profits.”
The DCR streetwear brand’s growing popularity can be credited somewhat to the tried-and-true aesthetic that arrived on the ranch decades ago and knocked on the front door. But it can also be credited in part to the singularity of that specific geography around Yellowstone, the all-American aesthetic that doesn’t quite map to a polarized ideology.
The cowboy is loyal to the job. The cowboy, Marlboro Man or not, is for everyone.
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