Half a Century Later, the Clothes of Midnight Cowboy Still Speak Volumes

When getting dressed, start with the hat. Shirt, pants, shoes, jacket — those all come later. Even underwear can wait. The hat, however, cannot. It’s a black Stetson — wide but not unwieldy, stiff, smooth, and perfectly curved. It sends a message; it creates a persona. Just look at Joe Buck. Stepping from the shower, towel cinched around his waist, he lifts the hat from its protective box. He sets it on his head — and suddenly he’s transformed. Now he’s not a dishwasher. He’s a cowboy.

So begins Midnight Cowboy, the 1969 classic that remains the only X-rated movie ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Set in the porny glow of old Times Square, Midnight Cowboy follows the exploits of Buck, a handsome Texas bimbo who moves to New York City with dreams of becoming a hustler. Struggling to find female clients, he starts selling his services to men — only to find himself thrust into the nightmare (or is it a fantasy?) of life on the edge.

Savage, hypnotic, and mercilessly bleak, Midnight Cowboy is the subject of Shooting Midnight Cowboy, a new book out March 16 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Frankel's book makes a vivid case that the film marked a new era in American culture and movie production. Released in New York just a month before the Stonewall riots, Midnight Cowboy broke taboos about depicting homosexuality and other “adult” themes onscreen. It also represented a dramatic break from the dying studio system, with its stifling moral codes and strict creative hierarchies. The result was innovation in virtually every part of the filmmaking process, from casting and lighting to cinematography and location scouting.

Midnight Cowboy’s costume designs were to have a particularly significant influence on the film industry. If Hollywood once positioned costumers as dressers to the stars, Midnight Cowboy helped usher in a new era, one where designers played a more integral and collaborative role. As Midnight Cowboy’s wildly talented costume designer Ann Roth demonstrated, clothes could mean as much, psychologically, as a performance or a line of dialogue. “She started from a simple premise,” writes Frankel. “Costume designers don’t just make outfits, they make characters.”

When designing Ratso Rizzo, a tubercular Italian bum played by Dustin Hoffman, Roth guessed the character would’ve been influenced by films like La Dolce Vita and 8½. So when she spotted a pair of Fellini-style white pants on a table outside Port Authority Bus Terminal, she pounced. Down 42^nd Street, the geographic baseline of Times Square’s debauchery, she nabbed a pair of ratty black high tops. “They were cockroach-in-the-corner shoes,” Roth says. “I had to have those.” Of a purple suit Roth dyed green for Ratso, Frankel writes, “It looked to her like some high school kid had rented it for his prom and then chucked it into a trash can after he threw up on it.” In other words, it was perfect.

One of Midnight Cowboy’s most memorable costumes came about purely by chance. Walking back to her apartment one night, Roth noticed a fox-fur jacket in the back seat of a parked car; smitten, she bought it off the owner for $200. Later in the shoot, when an actress expressed uneasiness about appearing naked in a sex scene, Roth was prepared.

“I think she should be fucked in fox,” she said.

“Fox?” came the incredulous reply.

“Yes,” says Roth. “Nothing but fox.”

Her most important designs were for actor John Voight, the midnight cowboy himself. As the opening lines of the original novel on which the film is based make clear, style is an essential part of the character’s identity: “In his new boots, Joe Buck was six-foot-one and life was different.” For Joe, clothes are a way of asserting control — over himself, over others — and further underline of his already formidable sexuality.

Roth’s designs for Voight served this vision well. The character cycles through a series of gorgeous pearl-button shirts embroidered with classic symbols of the American west: stars, birds, hearts, roses. (“Terrific shirt,” says Ratso on meeting Joe Buck in a bar. “I mean, that is one hell of a shirt.”) Joe also sports a pair of tight slacks that advertise precisely what he’s selling, along with a fringe-y suede jacket Roth made herself. “I didn’t want it to be cute,” she tells Frankel. “I wanted it to look real and unhip.” The result is a man who seems overwhelmingly adrift — and decidedly gay: If Joe’s cowboy duds looked tough and “manly” back in Texas, in Times Square they read as comically homoerotic. That Joe fails to understand this — that he thinks his brand of studliness is pure hetero gold — is part of what makes him so endearing. At one point, Ratso tries to set him straight, as it were: “That great big dumb cowboy crap of yours don’t appeal to nobody except every jockey on 42nd Street,” he yells. “That’s faggot stuff.”

Joe is mystified and angry. “John Wayne!” he shouts back. “You want to tell me he’s a fag?” Even for its time, the exchange is searing and uncomfortable—but it also serves to expose the contradictions at the heart of American masculinity. The “cowboy” archetype is the epitome of straight male power — unless it isn’t. Context is everything. Are they boots, or are they heels? Are they chaps, or are they, you know, chaps? They’re both, of course, and part of Midnight Cowboy’s genius is in how it plays with this duality. One man’s heterosexual hero is another man’s gay icon. Identity is relative, as much a product of perception as persuasion.

By the end of the film, Joe and Ratso have decided to leave New York. They board a bus to Miami, where Joe plans to pursue a new line of work. On the way south, Joe drops into a department store to buy a new set of clothes. Running back to the bus, he tosses his cowboy gear into the trash — shirt, boots, jacket, all of it, gone. Shorn of shoes and hat, Joe is quite literally a smaller version of himself. His charisma seems to have been cut in half.

Who will he become in Florida? The film is mum on this question, though, after reading Shooting Midnight Cowboy, you get the sense that Ann Roth had some idea where fate would take him. Whatever a man in a bland yellow button down and brown slacks does — that’s what Joe will do. Until, at least, he finds another outfit, another persona, another vision of who he can be.

Originally Appeared on GQ